Candidates Duke it Out in Vegas
By: William P. Stodden
Tags: 2020 Democratic Primary, Opinon, News, Politics, Current Events

“Will all actual Democrats raise their hands, please?”

Candidates Duke it Out in Vegas

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First, I would like to apologize to supporters of the following candidates who are vying for the privilege of being on the ballot in opposition to President Trump: former Mayor Mike Bloomberg, former Vice President Joe Biden, former Mayor Pete Buttigieg, and current Senator Amy Klobuchar. I apologize because whichever of these individuals is your preferred candidate, your preferred candidate is a Republican.

Sorry.

Since 1992, or before, the Democratic Party has radically shifted to the Right in this nation, and those ideas which would seem like Mainstream Democratic Party issues in all realms except cultural issues were GOP issues before then. 1992 is, if you are either too young, or have forgotten, the year that Bill Clinton was elected the 41st President of the United States. Clinton was a conservative Southern Democrat, and was incredibly popular in the US, mainly because his coalition included a lot of former Republicans who were just so sick and tired of slash and burn nonsense of the soon to be Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and his anti-tax, starve the beast cadres who would seize power in the “Revolution of 1994.”

Clinton was the chosen candidate of the right-leaning Democratic Leadership Council, who believed that the leftist orientation of the Democratic Party in the 60s, 70s and 80s meant that the Democratic Party would never win National Elections. The way to recapture office, they reasoned, was to sell out the poor and the working class in favor of middle and upper class interests. “Everyone is middle class” may as well have been their mantra. It was a cynical tactic aimed at recapturing power, and it destroyed the progressive bona fides that had held the FDR and LBJ coalitions together for decades and had guaranteed the Dems a 40-year monopoly on House Leadership. But hey! it got Bill Clinton elected, so I guess it was all worth it, right?

Clinton essentially capitulated to the GOP talking point that Leftism and Progressiveness were evil words, never to be uttered in Washington again, except by horrible socialists, or in Bloomberg’s words tonight, by “communists”. Clinton’s administration saw him work with, and brag about working with, the GOP to gut welfare, deindustrialize the US (which essentially ended the notion that hard work can actually lead to stability for millions of American workers, while paving the path that would lead Trump through the Rust Belt right into the White House) and incarcerate millions of Americans, who were disproportionately Black or Latino as a newly militarized police force raided our inner cities and carted people off to newly privatized prisons.

His cheap money policies ironically led directly to both the student debt crisis which is plaguing this country, and the mortgage crisis which essentially completed his war on the working class in this nation by teaching employers that they can expect their workers to work for nothing, and his administration’s lax policies toward pharmaceutical regulation led to not only the opioid epidemic, but sharply increasing medical prices which we seem to be completely incapable of getting ahold of today.

Clinton bombed Iraq regularly during his administration, and fabricated a war in the Balkans to take our attention off his impeachment. He did more to facilitate the rot in our nation than any other President during my lifetime, and the aftermath of his administration is still being experienced daily today.

But that same cynical nonsense still holds sway in the Democratic Party. President Obama, popular though he was, failed to end the war, failed to reign in big banks, and failed to end the garrotting of workers in the US. For 8 years, the Obama Economy disproportionately helped the rich get richer, a fact that he did not deny, while workers worked harder for the stagnant wages. The Wars continued, and new ones were started. More immigrants were deported by Obama’s Administration than before or, despite Trump’s most strenuous efforts, since. Etc etc etc…

Why in the world would anyone calling themselves “Democrats” still support these policies? These are Republican Party issues. Somehow, the svengalis in the GOP got the Democrats to do their work for them, so they could go off the deep end and prostrate themselves before their Dear Leader as full fledged members of his personality Cult. For the life of me, I am unable to provide a reason why, of the 6 people on stage at tonight’s wrestling match, 4 of them still explicitly endorse that DLC attitude toward the people of this nation. That ideology is corrosive, and quite frankly, produces very negative outcomes for the working and poor in this nation. It is largely the reason why a significant portion of the working people in our country decided that the Democrats are no longer on their side.

Based on their answers to the various questions posed by the moderators tonight, the only two actual Democrats, the only ones who actually adhere in any realistic way to pre-DLC Democratic Party principles are Senators Warren and Sanders. I know: Sanders claims to be a socialist. He is as much a socialist as I am a liberal, which is to say, not much at all, but hey, if he wants to call himself that, he’s welcomed to it, and my life is not affected a bit. Warren does not call herself a socialist, but a progressive and a capitalist. But whatever they call themselves, they are the only ones who hold true to the policies of the Democratic Party from the last time it was distinguishable from the Republican Party, being during the Lyndon Baines Johnson Administration.

The others could very easily be Republicans, and had Sanders and Warren not actually been there, we might be forgiven for believing that this was a four way debate among actual Republicans (who, for better or worse, can be conceptually separated from Trumpists.) Sure they all mouth the talking points about cultural issues. They all talk about Black and Brown people in jail, though it is not clear what any of them have done to get them out of jail, and it is clear that at least 3 of 4 of them have actively supported policies which increased the number of Black and Brown people bring railroaded to jail, while the fourth, Joe Biden, was an avid supporter (and co-author) of the Clinton Crime Bill, among other “tough on crime” DLC policies. Sure they support gay rights, and Buttigieg is himself gay, but let’s be completely honest: Buttigieg spent much of his life denying that he was gay by his own admission, and I doubt the other three have always been such ardent supporters of gay rights, until it was socially alright to openly support gay rights. I get it, personally, having taken a journey on the question in my adult life my own self. But I don’t represent like I am out flying the Pride Flag outside my house, and have been doing so since I could remember like these Conservative Dems. In short, I’m not Kirsten Gillibrand.

Gay Rights, Indeed! An obviously inebriated Clintonite K. Gillibrand points and yells at a camera.

The cultural issues aside, where are their pro-worker policies? What do they plan to do to help poor people not be poor? (Actually, we know Biden’s, Klobuchar’s, and Buttigieg’s answer: More Means Testing! And Bloomberg felt that too much was being taken from the rich, while advocating for higher taxes for the poor.) What do they plan to do to keep rich people from passing laws which protect wealth and privilege and make it easy for wealthy people to transfer wealth from the lower classes into their pocket? What do they plan to do to end the military industrial complex?

We know that Sanders and Warren both talk about all of these ACTUALLY progressive issues constantly, among a number of others. I could tell you what both of their plans are for any number of a slew of progressive positions. If I know anything about the DLC wing of the contest, it is that they intend to continue fighting for the (upper-) middle class: Buttigieg has recently even adopted fiscal hawk language, if not necessarily its associated policies yet, which is specifically designed to strengthen means testing for social welfare programs and balance the budget on the backs of the poor and workers. Biden and Klobuchar want to essentially keep everything the same with regard to health care, which includes provisions to allow private, for-profit insurance companies and pharmaceutical industries to continue to prey on the sick and the poor in this nation. And two of four of the DLC candidates still advocate for marijuana prohibition, despite the fact that 2/3rds of the people nationwide, from both sides of the spectrum, support ending prohibition and legalization.

Which leaves a sober observer, who has no stake in the fight, really, to scratch his head. The DLC position is clearly so anti-poor that its manifesto may as well be subtitled “How to help the Republicans starve the poor out of existence.” Meanwhile, demagogues like Donald Trump prey upon the poor’s fear and anxiety. The fact that so called front runners are pushing this Republican Agenda, except with more pandering to minorities, is underscored by the fact that at least one of them was not so long ago the Republican Mayor of New York.

What is most striking is that only Buttigieg took oblique notice of this in the “debate” tonight. It feels that it was almost an unspoken agreement that few, if any others, were going to mention it. But one thing is for sure: If Democrats nominate one of these four “moderates” which are actually Right of Center, but appear left of Center because the crazies on the far Right have dragged the center so far over that former Republican billionaires can now explicitly call themselves Democrats and run a credible campaign as such, then they too will wonder why they get Republican policies for the US, despite the fact that this country is a majority leftist nation, in terms of the policies it supports.

In conclusion, a recent article declared the Democratic Party to be “[T]he centrist Party.” The article is not wrong: DLC policies have ensured that there is no nationally organized Leftist Party. This is why Sanders and Warren seem so out of touch that Democratic Pundits , “insiders” and donors beg for alternatives to their whacky ways and are paralyzed with the fear that Americans might actually vote for them.

I am not saying that you should vote for either of these two: unless your desire is to see a Democrat run against Donald Trump in 2020. But here is my advice: Remember that Democrats have never been able to out-Republican the Republicans. With one exception, and that is Bill Clinton, which is why Republicans hated him so much, but he remains one of the most popular Presidents in recent history. Yes, he won, but what is a kingdom if it costs you your soul? I don’t believe that any of these people who are fighting to claim the DLC mantle will be able to pull off what Bill Clinton did. So if your argument is “electability” and you use that to disqualify either of the actual Democrats in the primary race, you will probably be shooting yourself in the foot. Good Luck with that.