Diatribes of Jay: Don’t Eat Your Young (or Your Old)!

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Something that perennially amazes me is how little patience we Americans have. Instant gratification are us. We expect immediate results even with things like national politics, which seldom move with quicker than tectonic grace. The more knowledge and common sense advise waiting and seeing, the more we want results now.

So it is with challenging Trump’s re-election. The Democratic primary campaign season has barely begun. Yet already candidates are amassing war chests of small contributions that once would have been unthinkable. Pete Buttigieg is a virtually unknown mayor with a husband and a name much harder to pronounce than Barack Obama’s. He’s only old enough to be president by two years. Yet already he’s got $7 million for his presidential run. Benie, who lost last time, has $18.2 million.

Me? I’m keeping my powder dry. There’s far too much at stake this time to choose prematurely.

The Dems have a bit less than nineteenth months to get this right. That’s plenty of time to find and select someone as talented as Barack Obama, which is just what the Dems did in 2007-2008. If they pick the wrong person, another four years of Trumpian free fall could turn our “shining city on a hill” into something resembling Aleppo, if not literally then figuratively.

So getting it right is far more important than getting it quick. Four big things counsel caution.

First and foremost is Dems being civil and even friendly to each other. When all this is over, and if the Dems win, they are going to have to govern. And they are going to have to govern well, together.

It will take a whole “team of rivals” to drag this country out of the ditch that Trump has dug and driven us into. A superbly qualified Cabinet and a Democratic Congress are going have to work together willingly and joyfully. Their leader will need the same kind of humility, patience and grace that Obama had as president. She or he will have to to inspire confidence and cooperation among a group of smart, powerful, ambitious and eager pols.

That role will require a very special personality. Choosing the right person will take all the nearly nineteen months we’ve got, in the white-hot crucible of presidential politics. Just like the presidency itself, it’ll be a marathon, not a sprint.

The second vital thing to remember is that Trump and all he stands for are the “enemy.” No one who calls herself or himself a “Democrat” is even close.

Ideology and policy, let alone purity, must take a back seat to beating Trump, McConnell and their ilk, decisively and finally. No matter how pure and unsullied the Dems may be, their loss this time would be disastrous for them, for all the minorities who depend on them for a semblance of equal treatment, for the nation, and for the world.

The Dems must coalesce as fierce allies to the same extent that our species would if invaded by aliens from outer space. In truth that’s not a bad analogy. In the evolutionary traits that let our species dominate our small planet—empathy, cooperation, and shame where warranted—Trump is as close to a space alien as anyone who has ever served as our president.

In this regard dinging Bernie because he topped a million from his book royalties is not only childish and stupid. It’s Dems shooting themselves in the foot with a howitzer.

Let me briefly count the ways. It plays right into the GOP narrative that Dems hate success and want everyone to be equally poor. It might cause Bernie to stumble with diffidence about making money the right way. In the 2008 election, Obama’s few million dollars from book royalties made him rich enough to be immune from corruption and beholden to no one. It’s hard to imagine any better way for a pol to become financially independent without sacrificing his or her integrity than writing books.

The third reason for patience and caution is that Dems have so many good theories but are still out of power, except in the House. I myself have propounded several good theories on this blog. Trump’s virulent anti-chivalry has provoked women’s rage as never before, at the same time as the hundredth anniversary of women’s suffrage is coming up. All this portends unique momentum for female candidates for president.

Another theory is that it’s finally minorities’ day. Obama proved that no one can evoke minorities’ enthusiasm like a real minority candidate. That’s especially true for African-Americans, with their four-century history of slavery, oppression, being deceived, and being taken for granted. And since white progressives like me don’t care about color, maybe a progressive minority candidate has the best chance of all.

Barack Obama broke the taboo. Now maybe any minority can compete fairly. Maybe a married gay like Pete Buttigieg can, especially one smart enough to tell Mike Pence that his quarrel is not with Buttigieg himself, but with his Creator. In this abstract strategizing, minority women like Stacey Abrams and Kamala Harris are twofers.

But all this is theory, not fact. The purpose of a long and exhausting primary season is to duplicate, as far as possible, the fog of (political) war that any Democratic will experience for at least four long years after being elected. The trial doesn’t end with election; it just begins. Remember how Mitch McConnell, taking up the gauntlet of that great patriot Rush Limbaugh, declared Obama’s failure as president his party’s chief goal mere days after Obama’s inauguration?

The final reason for waiting and seeing is that mistakes are inevitable. No one is perfect, and there are so many chances for “gotchas.” Who could have predicted that Bernie’s inveighing against “millionaires and billionaires” would come back to haunt him when his book royalties put him over a million? Who knew that millionaires today are a dime a dozen and that mere billionaire status barely puts you in the ruling class?

More serious mistakes are also possible. I have impliedly dinged both Bernie and Kamala for touting “Medicare for All” without regard to all the people who would lose private health insurance that they like and have to go shopping. That single mistake recalls the greatest domestic blunder that Obama ever made: the individual mandates and penalties that nearly killed off his “Obamacare” and many of the people it saved.

But mistakes can be corrected. Policies can be changed. It all depends on how well a candidate can pull it off. Flexibility and adaptability are vital qualities for any leader, as long as he or she has the skill to avoid being labeled a “flip-flopper.” It’s all a matter of that indefinable quality called “political skill”—something that Barack Obama has in greater abundance than any pol I’ve been able to vote for in my 73 years.

Voters will forgive much of a person they like and trust. They can even trust a vile demagogue like Trump, whose obsession with cruelty as a means of stopping refugees seeking asylum is not only utterly inconsequential to our national future but contrary to our most basic values.

What we need is someone who can put popular trust back on the right track. We need someone who can restore our moral sense as a nation. That’s a tall order.

It could be someone like Pete Buttigieg, who reportedly understands that “a president cannot execute his plans freely in office, . . . [so] it would be ‘inauthentic’ to make too many detailed promises.” It may be someone like Bernie or Kamala, who have started to inoculate our younger population against the demagoguery of name-calling against “socialists.” It may be someone like Elizabeth Warren, who talks straight talk and makes the arcane simple. It may be Stacey Abrams, who hasn’t decided whether to run yet but is brimming with the ideas of a successful state legislative leader and with zeal to let everybody really vote.

At this early date, the Dems can’t afford to dismiss anyone with talent. They can’t afford to eat their young, whether Pete or Beto. They can’t afford to eat their old, whether Bernie or Joe. They have to let the long game play out and take their best chance.

I still think China has, or at least had, a better system, before Xi Jinping made himself like an emperor. It didn’t depend so much on a single personality. A seven-member committee ruled China. The top two members served a five-year “apprenticeship” on that committee before ever assuming either of the two top jobs. And both the transitions to the top jobs and their performance were so much more insulated from irrelevancies—as well as public accountability—than here. The type of frat-boy insults that Trump exploited in his presidential debates would be inconceivable in China.

In our own country, the ascension to top jobs involves innumerable irrelevancies. It’s a bit like a jousting contest in medieval Europe.

The irrelevancies have only multiplied under Trump. There are “chops” and insults worthy of teenagers on a junior-high-school playground. There are dominance games like demeaning nicknames, belittling, and taunts about ethnic, political and social purity. (Remember “Pocahontas”?)

There is every form of belittling and “gotcha!” that political operatives can conceive. There is all the stuff that media mavens think our busy people are capable of focusing on, attributing to them the crudest mentalities and the most deficient educations. There is everything but how to cure our society of its persistent, glaring ills (all but foreign oil dependency). And this is not even counting the stomach-wrenching anachronism of our Electoral College.

But to paraphrase That Idiot Rumsfeld, we must fight an election with the system we have, not the one we would like. So we have eighteen months of figurative jousting, with all its puerile overtones and risks of chance, to look forward to. We have eighteen months of continuous verbal contest, not unlike the crooked game shows that the late Charles Van Doren became infamous for.

All this has precious little to do with governing but everything to do with who will get to govern us. The Dems must wait until they are sure their champion can win, because this time there is no room for error. Four more years of Trump, and our kids could forget what a democracy looks like, as well as what our Constitution says.

Erratum: An earlier version of this post said that McConnell, following Limbaugh, waited only days after Obama’s election to declare making his (and our!) presidency fail their party’s chief goal. In fact, it was days after Obama’s first inauguration. I regret the error, the more so because this precise story is something Americans and Democrats should never forget!

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Diatribes of Jay

16 April 2019

Don’t Eat Your Young (or Your Old)!

Links to Popular Recent Posts

Links to Posts since January 23, 2017

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