It’s the Team, Stupid!

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The phrase “It’s the economy, stupid!” traces to James Carville, Bill Clinton’s political svengali. Following it led Bill to two terms in the White House.

But that was then. This is now.

Today the economy is chugging along well, despite all the nonsense and showmanship Trump can throw at it. The traditional measures of the economy’s performance are at all-time highs: employment, GDP, and the stock markets. So if the Dems run on the economy, they are likely to lose the presidency yet again. Very few of Trump’s die-hard followers are likely to budge, unless they lose their jobs.

That could happen, but it’s not likely. Our economy is so big, diverse and resilient that it takes years for changes in economic policy to make a noticeable difference. That’s why Trump can take credit for the years-long recovery from the Crash of 2008 that President Obama and his team so carefully managed.

Eventually, Trump’s mindless trade wars and insistence on obsolete energy technologies will have their inevitable effects. But expecting those effects to show up before next November is a losing gamble. More likely, Trump will make a nothing deal with China, declare victory, and retain most or all of his base. His base might even grow, giving Trump “credit” for cleaning up the disastrous trade mess that he himself created.

No, “It’s the economy, stupid!” won’t work in 2020, except possibly for Trump. The Dems need to focus instead on what’s most wrong with Trump as president. He’s a one-man show, as close to an emperor as we have ever had. He doesn’t listen, except to the worst of our media. He doesn’t consult. With a single Tweet, he wipes out careful consultative processes among experts, developed over generations within American government. And he’s entrenching his ability to rule single-handedly by replacing the experts, one by one, with his sycophants and lackeys. If he wins a second term, that process will accelerate, vastly increasing the risk of a catastrophic, unrecoverable blunder, like an all-out war with Iran.

To win in 2020, the Dems need to do two things. First, they have to unite all the many, many people whom our “roaring” economy has left behind. To do that, they have to have a simple and coherent set of policies. They must stop confusing the public by fighting over details and nuances. They ought to be able to state their policies completely in a minute-long explanation or a 45-second rebuttal.

Second, and maybe most important, the Dems have to show the people that, in 2021, they’re going to give them their government back. The Dems must convince the public that democracy matters, that an excellent bureaucracy that gets things done for people matters, and that a huge military-industrial complex that doesn’t shoot from the hip matters. And they’re going to have to show the public, by the way they conduct themselves during the primary campaign, that they and only they can bring those essential things back, through teamwork.

So the motto for this primary campaign and the general-election campaign next summer ought to be simple: “It’s the team, stupid!”

This goes especially for Sanders and Warren. Both have much the same policies. They differ only in detail, at a level that passes over most voters’ heads. The few wobbly Republicans they might attract over the din of so-called “mainstream” media screaming “Socialism!” will hardly notice the difference. But their arguing about who said what about a woman reaching the White House will almost certainly turn most or all of those wobbling voters off.

There’s an essential numerical truth that our media and pundits, as far as I can tell, have utterly missed. In every poll of which I’m aware—nationally, in Iowa and otherwise—the sum of numbers for Sanders and Warren exceeds the sum for Biden, usually by a margin far above the polling error.

What does this mean? It means that a plurality of likely voters wants real change, not a “nice guy” who’s going to walk into the phalanx of Trump, Mitch, Fox and the oligarchs with outstretched hands trying to make friends. And they want real change in about the same numbers of Democrats (40%) as voters generally who took a gamble on Trump and now are sticking with him.

So Sanders’ and Warren’s task in the debate tonight and henceforth is difficult but clear. They must differentiate themselves peacefully and subtly while presenting a united front against the abomination of Trump’s mad imperial leadership. They must unwind the circular firing squad now.

Over the past two centuries or so, a handful of nations have captured the human imagination as leaders. In addition to our own, they include Britain, France, Germany, Japan and (more recently) the rising star China.

What point of distinction do they all have in common? Large, extended bureaucracies, full of well-trained experts in virtually everything: education, medicine, scientific research, toxic chemicals, the environment, commerce, trade, housing and outer space. These bureaucracies are where the rubber of human science, technology and “big data” meets the road of civilization.

We Americans used to have the best bureaucracy of the lot. Maybe we still do. But Trump has done his damnedest, as systematically as his scatterbrain permits, to undermine, destroy and degrade it. He’s attacked it with corruption in both senses of the word: mercenary venality and simple rot. He’s fired a lot of good people, and a lot more are leaving because they can’t stand to see their hard work—at pay far less than they could command in the private sector—being systematically undermined or reversed by political superiors with no relevant education, training or experience.

Failure to build a good team infects not just our bureaucracy, but the highest levels of our government. Consider the disastrous reign of George W. (“Dubya”) Bush, our first president to use demeaning nicknames as a tool of social dominance. He appointed forgotten and obscure Republican functionaries named Cheney and Rumsfeld as Vice President and Secretary of Defense, respectively. They brought us the War in Iraq, and on false pretenses! We are still fighting it seventeen years later, and the nation we supposedly fought it to help now may simply kick us out, after all our collective sacrifice in blood and treasure.

Like Trump, Dubya also demonstrated a classic flaw of insecure, incompetent leaders: appointing obscure people with no independent constituencies to high places, apparently to insure their absolute loyalty. Among Dubya’s examples were Alberto Gonzales, who served a little over 2.5 years as Attorney General before resigning under multiple scandals, and Harriet Miers, whom Dubya nominated to the Supreme Court but who failed to achieve confirmation.

Dubya and the Republicans are hardly alone in this regard. (Out of respect for the honorable dead, I won’t dwell on the late John McCain picking Sarah Palin as his running mate.) As beneficent a figure as Jimmy Carter today once had his Bert Lance. Hillary Clinton had her Huma Abedin and Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and God knows what other nobodies waiting in the wings to populate her cabinet. Few even considered what might had happened had she picked Bernie Sanders as her running mate, instead of the unknown and anodyne Tim Kaine. She might well be president today, with Sanders and/or Warren helping keep our finance rogues from blowing up our economy yet again.

No, the time is long past when American voters ought to expect winning presidential candidates to drag their obscure high-school friends, personal cronies and big campaign donors into the White House with them. We Americans have a right to expect them to build a good team, from known public figures with long track records, and to explain how they would do so before getting our votes.

Every president ought to have a couple of deeply trusted people in the White House with her or him. Often those people will be friends from the long past, unknown to the public. Obama had his innocuous Valerie Jarrett, for example. FDR had his Harry Hopkins, who served officially as Secretary of Commerce but in fact anchored and supervised FDR’s “brain trust.”

But politics is a profession, like any other. In fact, it’s one of the most difficult and demanding of all professions. It takes practice and experience. That’s why Abraham Lincoln assembled a famous “Team of Rivals” immediately after winning the most divisive election in our history. Among them were the very men who had hotly contested the election that Lincoln had just won.

That’s what we Americans desperately need this year, as I had hoped for in 2007. There may be reasons for candidates refusing to name names. But most of those reasons boil down to political-operative claptrap and sheer superstition. Anyway, the best way to attract voters disappointed that their favorite candidate didn’t win the nomination is to pick that candidate as veep or a member of the Cabinet, or at least to put her or him on a short list.

If our government is to start an optional war that lasts for seventeen years and counting, as in Iraq, or to bail out the bankers who caused a financial disaster, as in 2008, the public has a right to know the people who actually conceive and order those actions—not just the top dog who acquiesces in their ultimately wildly unpopular plans. Ideally, the public ought to be able to consider the character and track records of the masterminds in electing the top dog. In a healthy democracy the men or women who actually conceive those plans ought to have more public visibility than Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Hank Paulson had, respectively. They ought to be known quantities when the votes are cast.

After three years of the disaster that is Donald Trump, there’s enough for a dozen presidents to do. We have to restore a semblance of independence to our Fed, our Department of Justice, our FBI, our Department of State and our CIA. Ditto the EPA and OSHA. We have to get our finance sector under control again. We have to force industry to cut pollution before our national average longevity starts diving for reasons other than opioids. We have to start prosecuting and jailing home-grown domestic terrorists, and executing the worst of them. We have to get all of our people health insurance. We have to make our military, while still under ultimate civilian control, independent and future oriented. We have to end our endless wars in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan and decide rationally whether we really want a new war with Iran. We have to restore the funding and direction of our scientific research and chart a course toward carbon-free energy independence. We have to do something about the terrible economic inequality and corruption in our society. And we have to give all the people who work mostly with their hands good jobs and hope for their families’ futures.

Just as no one person can pilot a commercial airplane, design and program a Website, perform a heart or hip transplant, and lead a platoon in war, no single person can do all that needs to be done, even with all the power of the presidency. Our next president will need the ablest help available, including assistance of the very rivals who just recently finished fighting her or him for the nomination. And we, the public, need to know who they are or will be in advance.

As our once-superb government degenerates into a caricature of the late Roman Empire, we desperately need a White House and a Cabinet staffed by strong women and men with illustrious careers, independent constituencies and independent sources of power. The last thing we need is more obscure people picked for no other reason than long acquaintance with or loyalty to our supreme leader.

We’ve seen quite enough of that, thank you. We are now watching the consequences devour the very substance of our nation. And with every day in which every man and woman in government is judged on loyalty alone, the chance of making America great again sinks further into the mud.

Endnote: What Teamwork Might Look Like

Teamwork could be subtle. Or it could be as open and dramatic as Trump’s habitual showmanship.

Here’s a scenario that might blast the 2020 election wide open: Tonight, at the debates, Warren announces that she is ending her campaign for the presidency and throwing her support to Sanders. Sanders pledges to pick Warren as his running mate if he wins the nomination. The two together name a full Cabinet, including other current candidates, of course if they accept.

The public gets a “dream team” dedicated to virtually the same policies of real change, plus the campaign juggernaut of combined staff. Sanders gets a huge advantage with female voters. Public worry about his age and health disappears: if anything happens to him, Warren will become president. If Sanders’ health deteriorates under the pressure of the Oval Office, Warren can run for president in 2024 with his blessing and support.

If they win, the public gets a team dedicated to real change with specific policies, plus the more experienced of the two candidates in the top job. Warren gets a “boss” who she knows will respect her and give her a real portfolio, if only because he’ll have far too much on his own plate. The Dems’ primary race suddenly becomes a clear choice between “moderation” and real change, with real change the leader and both of the strongest horses pulling the wagon.

Fantastic, you say? Impossible? Well, how impossible did Trump’s presidency look four years ago? Wouldn’t this “impossibility” augur a bit better? All it would take is teamwork.

[Note: I suggest the combination in this order only because of the difference in age and experience. Warren is still my preferred candidate, but I would be absolutely ecstatic if she increased the chance of real change winning—and of enjoying an eight year run—in this way.]

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