Summary: the Democratic Party has a remarkable faculty for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. At every level, Democrats have a disturbing propensity for missing the point, addressing issues that may be of interest to policy wonks, but which don’t address the pressing political issues or crises of the immediate moment.
The other night’s Democratic debate was no exception to that rule. Democrats should have been talking about the man upon whom the 2020 presidential election will be a referendum; they should have been attacking Donald Trump in this debate. Instead, they wasted a great deal of time parsing the distinction between Obamacare and “Medicare for All,” or nattering on about free college for millennials and post-millennials, and trying to outdo one another with the sweet bribes that would be offered to the electorate, before being taken away in taxes. That’s a way of sending a signal to the constituency that the Party has utterly missed the point. “Empty calories.”
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Democrats have an almost unerring ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. It can happen, as it did in 2016, by Democrats pooh-poohing and tut-tutting the very notion of the existence of a Russian plot to steal the election for Donald Trump, deriding it as a red scare or as “McCarthyism.” Democrats got wise to what the Russians were doing, but they got wise to it six months too late, after a Russian asset had been installed as President of the United States.
At every level, Democrats have a disturbing propensity for missing the point. For example, In local California elections, positions such as city councilmember, Board of Education member, special District board member (if elected), and County supervisor are ostensibly nonpartisan. Too damn many Democrats still fondly cherish the naïve political belief that local races are indeed nonpartisan.
In reality, all local races are very much partisan. For years, the California Republican Party grasped this fundamental political truth, while Democrats primly, schoolmarmishly, pursed their lips and insisted otherwise. Because local elected offices are the training ground for legislative or statewide office, the California GOP carefully recruited local Republican activists to run for local offices. Once selected, these Republican officeholders were the bench from which the California Republican Party might draw the next tranche of partisan officeholders in Sacramento.
Until recently, however, the California Democratic Party did not seem to have grasped this fundamental lesson. Again and again, Democratic activists at all levels of the State Party pooh-poohed the very notion that it was important to cultivate candidates for local office. Consequently, throughout much of California, County and local officeholders tended to be overwhelmingly Republican.
Indeed, when activists in our local Desert Stonewall Democrats launched a campaign in the late 1990s to “turn the Coachella Valley blue,” other Democratic clubs pooh-poohed and tut-tutted as if we were promulgating some vile, malignant, pernicious political heresy. When I ran successfully for the Cathedral City City Council in 2002, a number of our local Democrats remonstrated with me for having the bad taste and poor form to pitch myself to the local Party as a Democrat.
That was the situation in the Coachella Valley at the beginning of the noughts, the first decade of this calamitous 21st century. Now, however, as we near the end of the tweens, the initial effort by a bunch of queer Democrats to turn the Coachella Valley blue has been more successful than we could imagine. The lion’s share of the Valley is represented in Congress by a Latino Democrat. The lion’s share of the Valley is also represented in the Assembly by a Latino Democrat. Democrats and queerfolk are to be found on city councils, school boards, and special District boards throughout the Valley.
Yet, despite our Democratic progress, despite the fact that the Valley is trending not merely purple but deep blue, some of our most ancient, most venerable (perhaps “most antiquated” might be a more accurate framing) Democratic clubs still keep missing the point. For example, during the 2012 cycle, when the Party needed to have all hands on deck to ensure Barack Obama’s reelection, and to ensure that our now-Congressman Raul Ruiz was successful in his challenge to Mary Whitaker Bono Baxley McGillicuddy, some of our Democratic clubs were devoting entire meetings, not to getting these good Democrats elected or reelected, but to pissing and moaning about the dangers of hexavalent chromium in agricultural wastewater.
Like the Republican fixation on chemtrails, the local Democratic fixation on hexavalent chromium, while interesting from a public health point of view, had absolutely nothing to do with the issue at hand, which was making sure that Barack Obama got reelected and that Raul Ruiz turfed out Mary Bono. The time spent whingeing about how hexavalent chromium was eventually going to kill us all (and all of us will die, eventually, hexavalent chromium notwithstanding) could and should have been better spent planning Get Out The Vote activities to support Democratic candidates.
In short, too damn many of our local Democratic activists were more interested in spending time missing the point then they were in mobilizing the electorate to support the Democratic Party, the Democratic platform, and Democratic candidates.
Much the same thing happened in the other night’s hypertrophic, hyperventilating, overlong, flabby debate. I foresaw accjurately that that sour, superannuated, shtetl Stalinist, that loudmouth Leninist loser, that bloviating, bourgeois, Burlington Bolshevik Bernard Sanders, would stand at his podium brandishing his bony finger at the audience, lecturing them on the evils of the “millionaire and billionaire class,” while offering for the umpteenth time his tired and tiresome class warfare platform to the viewing public for its consumption.
Similarly, I not inaccurately foresaw Elizabeth Warren falling into the temptation of spending far too much of her time attacking big tech, particularly Facebook and that neotenous Asperger Mark Zuckerberg, whose resemblance to Star Trek’s Commander Data seems to become more pronounced with each passing day.
I was relieved not to see Joe Biden being baited into a sterile debate about busing in the late 1970s, but I most definitely saw the other candidates desperately trying to score policy points. Withal, the most delightful moment of the debate was when Kamala Harris went after Donald Trump a couple of minutes into the debate.
Unfortunately, none of the other candidates followed Kamala in her devastating, delicious put down of The Donald. Instead, they spent a great deal of time doing what Cory Booker warned him not to do; they got into attacking one another over relatively minor policy differences that can and should be litigated in a new Democratic administration. All this quibbling over minor differences of policy misses the point. The issue before the Democratic candidates last night was Donald J. Trump.
Both Republican and Democratic observers and commentators have for years recognized the most fundamental political truth of every presidential election: it is a referendum on the incumbent, or, if the incumbent is termed out, a referendum on his party and its track record. In 1992, for example, the banner in the Bill Clinton War Room read “it’s the economy, stupid.” That didn’t mean that the campaign should be fought on questions of policy. It meant that under George Herbert Walker Bush, the economy was tanking and the Clinton campaign had an opportunity fight the election on that basis.
The Clinton strategy -aided indirectly by such media efforts as CBS’s ongoing series of reports from Ray Brady on the “The Money Crunch-” was not so much to talk about wonkish issues of the economy, which has rightly been termed “the dismal science,” but to hammer George H. W. Bush on the piss poor performance of the American economy on his watch.
The Clinton 1992 strategy of attacking the Bush administration and the incumbent President proved to be an unexpected, brilliant success. American voters did indeed blame George H. W. Bush for the lackluster economy, and they gave Bill Clinton the White House. That, and the sheer nuttiness of Ross Perot’s quixotic third-party bid, pounded the nails into the political coffin of George Herbert Walker Bush.
Democrats need to understand that Trump is the issue, the whole issue, and nothing but the issue. The other night’s Democratic debate needed to focus on Trump,
on Trump’s deferential attitude toward Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin,
on Trump’s treasonably incompetent mishandling of the situation in Syria
on his shameful, dishonorable, nay, treasonable abandonment of the Kurds,
on Trump’s truculent, dismissive attitude toward our Atlantic Alliance partners,
on Trump’s efforts to destroy the European Union,
on Trump’s efforts to fragment the United Kingdom, and
on Trump’s efforts to set Americans at odds against each other on a “divide and conquer” theory of governance.
In short, Democrats should have followed Kamala Harris’s line of attack, which she delivered beautifully but then got drawn off into wonkish policy discussions which basically amounted to which Democrat could offer the sweetest bribes to the electorate. Blame the candidates, blame the party, blame the moderators; withal the debate came across as flabby, and about as full of shit as a Christmas goose, like cotton candy: all spun sugar, empty calories, and absolutely no nutritional value.
This Democratic debate should have been focused on Trump’s corrupt, venal, borderline treasonable, efforts to involve foreign powers such as Russia, Ukraine, and China in his reelection effort.
Hell, Mick Mulvaney gave away the store this afternoon, admitting that there had indeed been a quid pro quo sought with Ukraine by which Ukraine would receive military assistance in return for providing dirt on Joe Biden! The Democratic candidates should have concentrated upon the impeachment process now underway in the House of Representatives. Moreover, they should have framed that discussion in the context of rallying around their fellow Democrat, Joe Biden, on the not contemptible theory that Democrats need to circle their wagons, much as the Cherokee used to circle their wagons on the Trail of Tears to defend themselves against angry whites seeking to compass their vanishing. Democrats should have said, one and all, that at this debate sniping at other Democrats, particularly at Joe Biden, was simply out of bounds.
But they didn’t. Democrats, like parties of the left all over the world, have a felt need to attack one another over minor doctrinal differences, as they did last night, and to engage in vicious heresy hunting that has the effect of giving aid and comfort to the party opposite. Perhaps no “Democratic” candidate exemplifies and personifies this left deviationist error quite so much as Bernard Sanders, the finger wagging Bolshevik from Burlington. His, and his followers’, betrayal of Hillary Clinton, The Democracy’s 2016 nominee, together with well-documented Sandernista misogyny, cost the Party and the United States the 2016 election. I predicted accurately that, given the tone of acrimony and backbiting which the Sanders people introduced to the Democratic primary campaign in 2016, that the candidates in tonight’s debate would take a metaphorical leaf out of the Sanders book and attack one another in the same testy manner in which the Sandernistas attacked Hillary Clinton.
In short, those of us watching this debate were right to have expected a kind of barely concealed acrimony that will accomplish nothing, clarify nothing, and aid and comfort no one except Donald J. Trump. The debate the other night night not only missed the point, it was also nothing but a master class, taught by masters, in the art of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Like its predecessors, this debate was nothing more than an “empty calories” waste of time.
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Paul S. Marchand, Esq. is an attorney who lives in Cathedral City and practices law in the adjacent Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. As much as the foolishness and idiocies of the Democratic Party are enough to set his diminishing resources of hair on fire, the Republicans are even worse. The opinions set forth herein are his own, and are not intended as, and should not be construed as constituting, any form of legal advice. If you take them as legal advice, you may not be the kind of person Mr. Marchand would care to have as a client.
