Normally primaries are time for candidates to solidify their party base, unless you are a Democrat. On the right John McCain has done a commendable–and for Democrats– formidable job of putting back together a Counterrevolutionary Coalition that six months ago looked ready to fall apart. The op ed pundits were writing gleefully about the death of the Reagan coalition and the disorganization of the Republican Party.
We forget that six months ago elements of that coalition such as the Religious Right and the Grover Norquist tax-cutters said they would vote for anyone but McCain. Some even said they would vote for Hillary Clinton or sit out the election. But McCain said the right words (pun intended) and made deals we will not know about until the election is over. It doesn’t take a six-figure salaried network talking head to know that two of those are the Supreme Court and the Vice Presidency.
On the Democratic side the opposite has occurred. Hillary Clinton has run a classic Karl Rove-style Republican wedge campaign designed not to bring the Party together but to invoke all the old GOP tactics. We have had guilt by association and smears of elitism and lack of patriotism, and even some veiled racism. These have all been the GOP’s stock in trade since before Karl Rove added direct mail and microtargeting to them. In short we have seen attempts to split voters by class, education, income, sex, and, yes, race.
In Clinton’s favor no one can deny all is fair in politics. She has also demonstrated that the pipe dreams the Democrats had two years ago after the midterm surprise were nothing more than what software developers term vaporware. Democrats believed the mess George Bush has made of this country would hand them the keys to the White House–vaporware. They believed the Iraq War would help build Democratic victories in Novermber–vaporware. They believed the mortgage crisis, $4 gas, Bear Stearns and the rest of our economic mess would usher in a new Democratic era–vaporware.
Clinton has cleverly found the divisions between various traditional Democratic voters and driven a wedge between them. NAFTA is one issue. Patriotism and love of country is another. Elitism is a third.
There is nothing wrong with candidates pointing out differences, that is the essence of politics, but where the GOP campaign was run around the usual primary strategy of who can best appeal to the members of the Party’s Coalition, the Clinton strategy has been all about driving wedges. These wedges have largely been designed to cover up her major policy gaffes: Iraq, NAFTA and Health Care.
With Iraq she has successfully diverted attention from her vote to authorize the war by impugning her opponent for not wearing a flag pin. With NAFTA–a policy initiated by her husband–she has diverted attention from her own flip-flopping to pandering to blue-collar voters by portraying herself as some modern Annie Oakley and her opponent as a guy who doesn’t know how to bowl and doesn’t understand small towns. With health care she has diverted attention from what doomed her disastrous plan during the Clinton Administration –it’s dictatorial, no choice attitude–to raising questions about her opponent’s pastor.
So instead of bringing the Democratic Party together as McCain has done with the GOP, this primary has split the Democrats apart in exactly the way the raucous Right would have done it. No wonder Rush Limbaugh suggested people vote for Hillary Clinton. Yet in doing this she has also inflicted two serious wounds. First, she has exposed the heart of Clintonism, which now stands like a stripped emperor revealed as what everyone said he was all along: at best Republican Lite and at its worst mere triangulation.
All of this should be apparent by now, but what the Clinton campaign has demonstrated and the Democratic Party has ignored is that unlike the GOP, they have not solidified their base. Among that base none has been more ignored than Liberal America.
Understand when I use that term I am not referring to those I term “limousine liberals,” the folks who ran the abortive campaign for millionaire Ned Lamont while deliberately snubbing, even alienating, blue collar voters. Nor am I talking about that strange new mutation termed “progressive,” which for some has become a wimpy way of avoiding the “l” word. Nor am I talking about those single issue folks who run litmus tests dipped in cyanide-laced kool-aid reserved for those who don’t march to their one-note goose step.
I am talking about another definition of :Liberal–and definitely not the psycho authoritarian father framing of George Lakoff–but a moral compass lost over that last few decades that once pointed the way for everyone from William Jennings Bryan to Harry Truman. It runs through their speeches so much the same person could have written them.
A hundred years ago Norwegian immigrants in a little township in the high plains of North Dakota were among many who articulated that belief and lived their lives by it. In that elemental place the people of Big Meadow articulated a fundamental principle that represents the heart of what I term Liberal America: the duty of government is to insure a level playing field.
Like many during what was loosely-termed the Progressive Era, they knew what could happen to people. A farmer whose arm disappeared between grinding gears, a widow trying to make a go of it after her husband had succumbed to a fatal ailment, had their lives jerked out from under them through no fault of their own, the way someone clumsily yanks off a table cloth, leaving everything to crash to the floor.
The fingerprints of liberalism lie everywhere on this nation, from public buildings built by the Works Progress Administration, to schools, roads, homes and utilities paid for by government grants, loans, and subsidies. You cannot pass through the core of any city, drive on any road, visit any national park, or enter any school, hospital, or government building without passing over ground built by Liberal America. Liberalism pervades every American household, where someone has benefited from government programs, ranging from college loans to unemployment, from the minimum wage and collective bargaining to regulations assuring the safety of the food we eat, the air we breathe and the water we drink. We do not live in fear of someone arbitrarily knocking down our doors in the middle of the night or of not being able to speak our minds, because the people who fought for those rights believed in the level playing field.
Perhaps one of the most unabashed liberals of all, Hubert Humphrey, movingly described what Liberal America meant to him when he wrote about growing up in a small South Dakota town during the Depression. Driven from their home, his family was in danger of breaking apart, as so many had during those times when monstrous, choking clouds blacked out all light and hope. “That period was to teach me,” said the future Vice President:
What government can mean to a society, how government can really affect the day-to-day lives of individuals for the better. It taught me what government can mean in terms of improving the human condition and improving the human environment. I witnessed how government programs literally rebuilt the territory and made life again tolerable, filling people with hope.
A generation later Humphrey’s successor, Paul Wellstone—who may have been the last senator to openly claim the label “liberal”—put his own generation’s stamp on Humphrey’s words. His short, stocky wrestler’s body punctuating the rapid, rhythmic phrases that were his trade mark as his hands and arms moved to put a headlock on whatever issue he was confronting, Paul Wellstone could recite a long list of what liberalism has given America. One of his greatest speeches, given to the Iowa AFL-CIO in 1998, captures this perfectly. Wellstone starts one of his classic riffs, which uses repetition to carefully build to his conclusion:
Because of you, families have more bread on the table.
Because of you, workers receive at least a minimum wage.
Because of you, labor has the right to organize.
Because of you, we have the right to join a union.
Because of you, working families have insurance against unemployment.
Because of you, workers have protections against unsafe workplaces…
Because of you, working families have more economic justice.
And because labor is part of a larger justice tradition,
because of you, our children have protection against ravaged air and water.
Because of you, people have protection against discrimination because of the color of their skin.
Because of you, women have protection against discrimination because of their gender.
Because of you, people have protection against discrimination because of their disabilities.
Because of these victories, even if they do not all yet work perfectly, the United States became a better country,
for all Americans.
When I wrote about the history of Liberal America and its assault under a Republican Counterrevolution whose ideal, in the words of Karl Rove, was the McKinley Administration, I identified the level playing field as being supported by four cornerstones: economic and social justice, educational equity, media fairness and voting rights.
Go to the websites of either of the two Democratic candidates and search for those values. Search for a commitment to the level playing field. It is this principle that can bring the Democratic Party back together. It is this principle the candidates ought to be debating not flag pins and bowling scores. It is this principle they ought to be spelling out how to actualize through specific programs not analyzing the Reverend Wright’s latest attempt to grab fifteen minutes of fame. It is this principle we all ought to be pushing the candidates to support and articulate not the narrow objectives of our own narrow single interest group.
I have written how Bill Clinton disavowed this principle in his Second Inaugural and thereby put Liberal America in intensive care. Now his wife proposes to euthanize the patient. And Barack Obama keeps telling us, like the kind doctor who is designate to explain a death to the next of kin, that we need to move on, that such a change can be good, that the patient is not worth fighting for.
There have been times in the past when people have tried to declare the patient dead, but some group , some movement and even a few new political parties have brought those principles back to life. I believe it will happen again because I believe in the American people, but I am losing faith that it will happen this November.
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