[Peace] Let the Long-Delayed Democratic Party Leadership Accountability Conversation Begin

[Robert Naiman]

Let the Long-Delayed Democratic Party Leadership Accountability
Conversation Begin

Summary: Democrats in America need new leadership. It’s time for Nancy
Pelosi to retire. Let’s have an open race for Speaker of the House, not
another anointment and coronation of someone “inevitable.”

===

After Hillary Clinton failed to defeat Trump in 2016 - following a primary
in which we were told that Hillary was “inevitable” and that we had to
swallow our concerns about Hillary’s warmongering and corporate globalist
trade policies that caused us to support Obama in 2008 against Hillary,
because supposedly only Hillary could beat Trump and supposedly Hillary was
guaranteed to beat Trump - there should have been a thoroughgoing,
bottom-to-top, party-wide leadership accountability conversation in the
Democratic Party. There wasn’t. The Clinton-Pelosi-megadonor oligarch
forces who control the “commanding heights” of the national Democratic
Party, in order to maintain their power in the national Democratic Party
without accountability, changed the channel of the conversation in the
national Democratic Party from their own spectacular failures to “Russia,
Russia, Russia.” According to the “Russia, Russia, Russia” narrative which
was promoted by these forces, the reason that Trump won in 2016 was because
of Russian interference in the election, not because of the systemic
failures and corruption of the national Democratic Party leadership,
exemplified by their failure to take a clear line against Obama’s wildly
unpopular TPP trade agreement - which was opposed by all of labor and all
enviro groups, two key Democratic base constituencies - in the campaign
against Trump and by Obama’s spectacular failure to deliver on his 2008
campaign promise to “not just end the Iraq War but end the mindset that got
us into war in the first place,” which promise was a key reason that he
defeated Hillary in the 2008 primary and thereby got to be President in the
first place.

Let us now begin the real, thorough, bottom-to-top party-wide Democratic
Party Leadership Accountability Conversation that should have happened in
2016 when supposedly “inevitable” and supposedly “invincible” Hillary
failed to defeat Trump.

Once again the national Democratic Party leadership has spectacularly
failed Democratic Party base activists - the small donors, the people who
make phone calls and knock on doors. Biden may yet eke it out in the
election for POTUS. But even if he does, it should never have been this
close. If the stakes were as high as Democrats claimed - and indeed, I
completely agree with other Democrats that the stakes were that high - it
should never have been this close. And then there is the question of what
happened and didn’t happen in the elections for the Senate and the House.

The people who control the “commanding heights” of the national Democratic
Party are consistently making the wrong strategic calls from the point of
view of the interests of base Democratic activists. Since, besides money,
the interests of base Democratic activists are apparently the only things
that the people who control the “commanding heights” of the national
Democratic Party can ever be made to care about, it’s the only vantage
point of critique worth discussing now.

Look what just happened in Maine. Why didn’t Biden have sufficient
coattails to elect Sara Gideon? Why couldn’t Sara Gideon close the deal
with Maine voters who were voting for Biden against Trump? According to the
people who control the “commanding heights” of the national Democratic
Party, Susan Collins was supposed to be super-vulnerable because she voted
to confirm Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, supposedly lethal to her
“pro-choice Republican” brand, and because she voted to acquit Trump on the
Ukraine impeachment allegations, supposedly lethal to her “independent
Republican” brand.

How did the people who control the “commanding heights” of the national
Democratic Party get this so wrong? Why were they so certain that “abortion
rights plus Supreme Court plus Ukraine impeachment” was a winning electoral
formula against Susan Collins in Maine when it so clearly wasn’t?

Who called the play on Ukraine impeachment? Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff.
Why this play, and no other? What was accomplished for Democrats by this
play, if anything? There were other choices available. There was the choice
of not impeaching Trump at all, which Pelosi herself argued in favor of for
a long time. Given the choice to impeach Trump, there were other things to
impeach him on, like domestic corruption, domestic abuse of power, the
unconstitutional Saudi war in Yemen, which every Democrat in Congress had
voted to end. Why Ukraine? Why something that almost no Americans outside
the Beltway care about? I have a theory: because Nancy Pelosi is
fundamentally unaccountable to Democrats outside the Beltway who don’t give
a lot of money to the Democratic Party. Given the choice to impeach Trump,
her choice was to appeal to the moneyed interests inside the Beltway who
want more aggressive foreign policies, not to the interests of base
Democratic activists outside the Beltway, to whom she is fundamentally
unaccountable.

To be clear: I’m not criticizing the Ukraine impeachment on the merits. I
watched the hearings. If I were a Senator, I would have voted to convict on
the merits. I’m saying that given the decision to impeach, Pelosi had a
strategic political choice to make for how to impeach Trump, and everybody
in Washington who ever makes such a decision always tries to think through
the political implications, whether they succeed in doing so or not, even
when they’re doing the right thing for the right reasons. There’s no
question that Pelosi thought she was thinking through the political
implications at the time, she spoke about these issues openly at the time,
as she often does, in speaking with inside the Beltway political actors and
reporters, as other Washington actors often do. As a choice of political
strategy, the Ukraine impeachment was a Big Fail in terms of the interests
of base Democratic activists. It did not recruit significant Republican
support, which Pelosi herself had correctly argued was a key criterion for
effective use of the impeachment weapon. Democrats who impeached Nixon bent
over backwards to attract Republican support, even though Democrats had big
majorities in Congress at the time, so the impeachment wouldn’t appear
“partisan.” Ukraine impeachment attracted almost no Republican support.
Why? Because Ukraine policy is something that almost no people outside the
Beltway care about, so there was no serious pressure on Republicans from
their constituents to support it. The only serious pressure that was coming
on Republicans from constituents was from Trump supporters. So of course
they went with Trump.

Likewise, the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings were a Big Fail in terms of
the interests of base Democratic activists. They mobilized Republicans much
more than they mobilized Democrats. You see Republicans complaining
bitterly about how Kavanaugh was treated a thousand times more than you see
Democrats celebrating how Democrats gave Kavanaugh a hard time. Did you
notice how in the recent Supreme Court confirmation hearings, Democrats
focused much more on the fate of Obamacare, an economic populist issue,
than on abortion rights, an identity politics issue? Why do you think that
was? Because there was a national election coming up. The economic populist
issues are like type O blood. They work everywhere in the country. Abortion
rights doesn’t work everywhere as an electoral issue. It doesn’t even work
with Democrats in southern Illinois. When Dick Durbin was in the House, he
was anti-choice. Do you know why? Because he’s from southern Illinois,
where the Democrats are anti-choice. When Democrats are campaigning in
southern Illinois, they’re not going out of their way to brag about being
pro-choice.

Since 1993, when President Bill Clinton crammed NAFTA down our throats
after opposing NAFTA as a bad deal when he was running as a candidate
against Bush the First, whose deal it was, base Democratic activists have
been told that we have to suck it up for the people who control the
“commanding heights” of the national Democratic Party, people who have
brought us terrible trade deals and terrible wars, because of abortion
rights and the Supreme Court. Well, how did that strategy work out? How did
that trade-off work out? We certainly got the terrible trade deals and the
terrible wars. How are abortion rights and the Supreme Court doing now? Not
so well, eh? What exactly did we get in exchange for the terrible trade
deals and the terrible wars?

>From the point of view of the interests of base Democratic activists, the
small donors, the people who make phone calls and knock on doors, Nancy
Pelosi’s top political priorities as Speaker of the House are electing
House Democrats and electing Democratic Presidents. At long last, let us
openly acknowledge to each other that Nancy Pelosi just isn’t very good at
this. She’s very good at raising money from megadonor oligarchs and
spreading it around, nobody disputes that. But Bernie proved that you don’t
need megadonor oligarch money to win elections, and Bloomberg proved that
you can throw a lot of megadonor oligarch money around and have nothing to
show for it. Bloomberg just spent $100 million in Florida. What does he
have to show for it? Biden under-performed Hillary against Trump with
Latinos in Miami-Dade, which is why Biden lost Florida to Trump. How come
Bloomberg’s $100 million didn’t do anything to help with that?

The pollsters got it wrong again. Why? I have a theory. There is another
name for Trump voters who are not “traditional Republicans.” We used to
call them “working class Democrats.” We used to call people who don’t have
college degrees “workers” and “working class people.” These are the former
Democrats in the Midwest who the people who control the commanding heights
of the national Democratic Party abandoned when they crammed NAFTA and the
WTO down our throats and tried to cram the TPP down our throats. Union
households in Ohio voted for Trump. Why? Because many of these people
justly feel abandoned and betrayed by the people who control the commanding
heights of the national Democratic Party. I’m from the Midwest. I lived in
the Midwest most of my adult life. I was a Democratic elected official, I
was a Democratic precinct captain, I was a union organizer. I was with the
Staley workers in Decatur when they were locked out by Tate & Lyle for
fighting to maintain an eight hour work day and a safe plant that they
wouldn’t die in. I know these people. I walked on their picket lines, I got
arrested with them. I drove two Staley workers from Decatur to New York
City for the AFL-CIO convention that elected John Sweeney to replace the
old guard. One of the grievances that drove Sweeney’s election was that the
old guard hadn’t fought hard enough to stop Bill Clinton from cramming
NAFTA down our throats.

I tried to warn the national Democrats about Trump and Democratic trade
policy and the Midwest. Others did too. AFL-CIO President Trumka did too.
When Brexit happened in the UK, Trumka gave a speech: “It could happen
here.” Then CPC co-chair, later runner-up DNC Chair candidate Keith Ellison
tried to warn national Democrats that Trump could win. Keith Ellison is,
among other things, an economic populist and an organizer and a BernieBro
from Minnesota. When Trump won the Republican nomination, Trump gave a
victory speech in Indiana. The entire speech was about trade policy, none
of the “nasty stuff” personal attacks Democrats associate with Trump, all
about NAFTA and the TPP and trade policy. I tried to warn national
Democrats. National Democratic leaders didn’t listen. They didn’t listen
because they care more about the megadonor oligarch money that funds them
than they care about working people in the Midwest.

Why do pollsters keep underestimating these Trump voters? I have a theory.
Because they’re so disaffected and alienated, they’re only coming out for
anti-establishment economic populist candidates like Trump and Bernie and
Paul Wellstone and Jesse Jackson. So they don’t look to pollsters like
“likely voters.” It has always the dream of the electoral Left to “expand
the electorate,” get disaffected and alienated working class people to
vote, use that to win elections, use the win to deliver stuff to the
disaffected and alienated working class people to prove to them that their
participation can matter so they keep participating. Trump the Grinch stole
the electoral Left’s Holy Grail. He expanded the electorate by railing
against the elites. We could get a lot of these people to vote for
Democrats. But they’d have to be economic populist anti-establishment
Democrats, not the elitist Clinton-Pelosi identity politics Democrats. The
elitist Clinton-Pelosi identity politics Democrats don’t want the formerly
Democratic Trump voters to participate in the Democratic Party, because
they’d make demands that the elitist Clinton-Pelosi identity politics
Democrats don’t want to deliver, because that would upset the megadonor
oligarchs who fund the elitist Clinton-Pelosi identity politics Democrats.

What is Trump’s basic message? “The reason you’re struggling is that elites
who don’t care about you are selling out the country to foreigners.” Look
at the sweep of world history. That’s not intrinsically a right-wing
message. How did the Communists come to power in Russia and China and Cuba?
How did Mossadeq come to power in Iran? How did the Sandinistas come to
power in Nicaragua, how did Lula come to power in Brazil, how did Evo come
to power in Bolivia? “The reason you’re struggling is that elites who don’t
care about you are selling out the country to foreigners.” But of course
that’s also how the Fascists came to power in Germany and Italy. Populism
is a baseball bat that can be swung both lefty and righty. It doesn’t have
to be racist. It doesn’t have to be xenophobic. Outrage can be focused like
a laser beam on the domestic elites who want to sell the country out to
foreigners. Those domestic elites are as American as apple pie. They look
and talk just like me and most of the people I went to public school with.
They’re just a lot richer and more powerful than we are. And mostly they
live in the Eastern and Pacific time zones, not in the Central Time Zone.
What did Harry Truman call it? “God’s Time.”

It’s easy to be a progressive economic populist without being racist or
xenophobic. When Jesse Jackson was running for President, he liked to tell
the following story. Two Iowa farmers are talking. One of them says, “I
like the things this guy Jesse Jackson is saying. He’s talking about saving
our family farms. He’s talking about reining in and re-regulating the Wall
Street banksters. He’s talking about making it easier for our little kids
to see a doctor and for our high school kids to go to college.” The second
Iowa farmer says, “Yeah, I like what that guy Jesse Jackson is saying too.
But that guy Jesse Jackson is Black.” “That’s true,” the first farmer says.
“That guy Jesse Jackson IS Black. On the other hand, the banksters who
foreclosed on our farms were White.”

The core reason that the Clinton-Pelosi megadonor oligarchs don’t want
Democrats to swing this bat is NOT because the Clinton-Pelosi megadonor
oligarchs are anti-racist, NOT because the Clinton-Pelosi megadonor
oligarchs are anti-xenophobic, but because the Clinton-Pelosi megadonor
oligarchs are elites who want to sell the country out to foreigners. Their
fake opposition to racism and their fake opposition to xenophobia are a
subterfuge for their real agenda, which is to sell the country out to
foreigners.

Democrats in America need new leadership. It’s time for Nancy Pelosi to
retire. Let’s have an open race for Speaker of the House, not another
anointment and coronation of someone “inevitable.”
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