By: Paul S. Marchand
Summary: The propensity of Democrats, particularly Democrats on the so-called Sanders left, to engage in purity tests and circular firing squads has been on full display over the last 48 to 72 hours. Apparently they’ve got their knickers in a knot over the way Joe Biden spoke of the importance of working across the aisle, even with people you differ from, to accomplish good public policy. Sad!
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Cathedral City, June 20, 2019 -- Joe Biden has committed the terrible “sin” of speaking candidly about the importance of working across the aisle, even with persons whom one finds objectionable, to accomplish sound public policy.
His Democratic primary opponents, the Sanders left, and Social Justice Warriors of every stripe have piled on to accuse him of “racism” and to excoriate him for the heresy of having even engaged with segregationist Republicans and Southern Democrats on matters not relating to the enormities of Mr. James Crow.
Such a Puritan posture is counterproductive at best, and destructive of The Democracy at worst.
I think I can speak with some credibility on this issue. As a member of the Cathedral City city Council for eight years, I learned the value of compromise and of being willing to listen to good ideas from otherwise thoroughly bad people. Indeed, when I was first elected to the Council, a mentor of mine, the late Desert Hot Springs Councilman Gary Bosworth, reminded me that in municipal governance, the secret to advancing any policy was “being able to count to three,” that is, on a council of five members, being able to reach working consensus on an issue among at least three of the five members.
As a practical matter, being able to count to three meant being able to overcome one’s visceral personal dislike of some of one’s colleagues. Former mayor (the worst and most ineffective in Cathedral City’s history) Kathleen Joan DeRosa and I cordially loathed one another, yet on a majority of issues coming before the city Council, we were able to put our mutual loathing aside and vote the same way. Indeed, the number of 5-0 votes on the city Council stood as a mute testimonial to the ability of all of us to work across a metaphorical aisle.
There was no love lost between me and Kathleen, or between me and the late Chuck Vasquez, who had to resign from the Council in disgrace when he was caught embezzling from the city, and certainly there was no love lost between me and former councilmember Bud England, a compendium of everything so objectionable in this country about evangelical Protestant Nonconformity. Yet on something like 85% of the votes taken by the city Council during my tenure, we were able to find unanimity.
Perhaps that is why I am so upset, nay, offended, by the criticism raining down on Joe Biden for having spoken of his ability to work across the aisle. Apparently, among Democratic purists, particularly pompous Cory Booker, is now a grave heresy to have been able to work across the aisle, even with people whose values one scorns, or with whose Weltanschauung one disagrees profoundly. Apparently, in the new purist left —particularly the Sanders left– Weltanschauung, being able to agree with such a person is simply unacceptable, and makes one “racist.”
I took particular exception to New Jersey junior senator and presidential wannabe Cory Booker’s pompous, self-important, un-self-aware attacks on Joe Biden not only because I thought they displayed a lamentable lack of understanding of collegiality —an understanding one would have expected from the former mayor of the largest city in New Jersey— but also because I found Cory Booker’s holier-than-thou Puritanism offputting and offensive to begin with. Frankly, I have had a lot of trouble forgetting or forgiving Cory Booker’s May, 2012 characterization of certain remarks of Pres. Barack Obama as “nauseating.” That’s a kind of Democratic disloyalty that I can neither abide nor tolerate. Pres. Obama deserved better from Cory Booker than he got. Mr. Booker’s pomposity may very well get the better of him as he struggles to command more than one percent of primary voters.
And of course the redeless votaries of Vermont independent Sen. Bernard Sanders — who should not have been allowed to run in 2016 or now as a Democratic candidate — have been gleefully touting their Schadenfreude on social media. Of course, Bernie, who carries a nostalgic torch for the long-vanished Soviet Union, has never been known as one who plays well with others in the senatorial sandbox.
Unfortunately, the criticism coming Vice President Biden’s way seems reflective of the hyper-partisanship, ideological posturing, and purity politics that has become so much a part of the new normal in the era of Donald Trump. While Trump himself has no ideology beyond that of treasonably enriching himself and his family at the expense of the public fisc, many of his supporters are profoundly ideologically driven. Democrats, partially understanding the nature of the beast with which they are dealing, have allowed themselves to become every bit as ideologically intransigent as the Republican self-identified Trump True Believers.
By indicating a desire to work across the aisle with members of the party opposite on mutually agreeable policy formulations, Joe Biden has not preached any political heresy at all. Instead, he has preached the old-fashioned political Gospel according to James Madison and expressed in the Constitution of the United States. Instead of castigating uncle Joe for being willing to call for a return to correct and honorable government, we should be applauding his fidelity and commitment to the vision of the Founders.
The men who came together in the summer of 1787 in Philadelphia had prosecuted to victory the world’s first war of national liberation, who had kept a delicate, chaotic union of 13 states together through through the Confederation period, transcending and triumphing over fissaparous tendencies which might have sundered the infant Republic, finally came together to accomplish what historian Catherine Drinker Bowen referred to, with only a small touch of hyperbole, as a “miracle at Philadelphia.”
Much of what made that “miracle at Philadelphia” possible was a sheer willingness to engage in old-fashioned political horse trading, to compromise, and to arrive at workable, if imperfect, solutions. Flinty, uncompromising, New Englanders and Down-easters found themselves making common cause with urbane man of affairs from New York and the mid-Atlantic states. Stern Calvinist Congregationalists found themselves working with Anglican Cavalier descendents of Virginia and the Carolinas, in an unwonted and unexpected spirit of compromise. Indeed, so strong was a spirit of compromise and accommodation at Philadelphia during that exceptionally humid summer of 1787 that the still-in-force Constitution they produced was innocent of any mention whatsoever of political parties.
Thus, when Joe Biden speaks of working across the aisle, even with individuals whose values he may find abhorrent, to accomplish good and sensible public policy, we should be hesitant, for the Constitution’s sake as well as our own safety’s sake, to excoriate him as if he had violated some doctrinaire, European ideal of revolutionary partisanship and ideological purity.
Yet that is exactly the temptation into which Democrats in this hypertrophic, hyperextended, hyperventilating, hyperpartisan 2020 primary election cycle are falling. We have apparently bought into the Leninist idea that every difference of opinion is irreconcilable, and that the mere idea of speaking civilly to those with whom one differs profoundly on certain issues is, indeed, a political and doctrinal heresy.
Democrats have always been enamored during my lifetime of purity tests, litmus tests, doctrinaire ideological purity, and turning on one another to enforce what any given faction considers to be the “party line.” Buffeted about on every conflicting wind of doctrine imaginable, Democrats fling away the opportunity for victory in search of an ideologically perfect candidate. Bill Clinton was right to suggest that “Republicans want to fall in line; Democrats want to fall in love.”
Perhaps, instead of seeking the perfect candidate, Democrats should seek the best candidate available, the candidate who is “good enough,” if not perfect. In this year when Russians are trying again to subvert the American democratic process, perhaps we should take counsel from the late Adm. Of the Fleet of the Soviet Union Sergey Georgyevich Gorshkov, who, noting the desire of most navies for all kinds of bells and whistles and technological wonders in their weapon systems, responded with the homely aphorism “‘good enough’ is best.”
Instead of seeking the perfect candidate, let us be satisfied with the candidate who is “good enough,” because Sergey Georgyevich was more right than he knew: “‘ good enough’ is best.”
Postscript: pompous Cory Booker, struggling to break 1% in Democratic primary polling, poured gasoline on the fire in an interview last night on MSNBC's The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, when he offered an unbelievably pompous word salad justifying his earlier attacks on front runner Joe Biden.
Now it’s to be expected that also-rans such as Cory Booker would be tempted to try to take out the frontrunner. It’s the price of frontrunner status. However, what made Sen. Booker’s remarks doubly offensive to queerfolk was his condescending, tone deaf, un-self-aware appropriation of the LGBTQ civil rights struggle in the service of his own attacks on the quondam Vice President.
Queerfolk do not need to be lectured to by politicians of color who have been accustomed for a long time to pooh-poohing the reality of the queer struggle for an authentic, first-class place in the American Commonwealth. Too many of these politicians of color reject any form of queer analogy to the African-American civil rights struggle, walling off that protean struggle as the exclusive property of the African-American community.
Yet, what the watchmen on the African-American wall apparently don’t know is that the struggle for full civil rights for queerfolk was already well underway when the Supreme Court rendered its unfortunate decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) 163 U.S. 537. Though the queer nation has unabashedly and unashamedly gone to school, as it were, on the strategy and tactics employed by the African-American civil rights movement, neither queerfolk nor African-Americans should ever accuse each other of appropriation, except where Cory Booker tries to appropriate, during Pride Month at that, the struggles of queerfolk in an attempt to legitimate an ill-informed, ill-founded, foolish attack on Joe Biden.
All Cory Booker did last night was to accomplish a further diminution of his already minimal chances of scoring the Democratic presidential nomination next year.
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Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives in Cathedral City and practices law in neighboring Rancho Mirage. He served two terms on the Cathedral City city council, where he learned the value of compromise. His views are his own, and do not reflect those of the Democratic Party or any other organization with which he is now or ever has been associated.
