Editorials

Promoting the Best, Planning for the Good

Becky O'Malley
Friday February 05, 2016 - 01:36:00 PM

First, let’s get this out of the way: I voted for Eldridge Cleaver for President, in, what was it, 1968?

That was when I was living in Ann Arbor, and had been hard at work for at least 4 years trying to end the war in Vietnam.

I was one of the many who worked to dump Lyndon Johnson for being a despicable war-monger, and we were gleeful when he announced that he wouldn’t run again.

I also, however, despised Hubert Humphrey for being a war-monger, which he was, like many good Democratic liberals in those days, though I also despised Nixon for that reason and many others.

I wasn’t properly conscious of what Johnson had accomplished for civil rights. (What have you done for me lately?)

In those days Michigan, thanks to a powerful United Auto Workers union, was a reliably Democratic state, and the polls predicted that Humphrey would take its electoral votes, so I knew my vote for Peace and Freedom candidate Cleaver was a safe protest.

But as it happened in later years, the dashing Mr. Cleaver turned out even worse than either Humphrey or Nixon—at least neither of them became a conservative Republican or even a Mormon.

After that I was one of the early organizers of the Michigan campaign for Shirley Chisholm, running in the Democratic primary against George McGovern in 1972 as both the first woman and the first African-American to be a candidate for a major party nomination. I though he was a wuss, and she was a heroine with powerful appeal to both my feminist and my civil rights activist instincts.

We did a respectable job in that race, getting 5% of the primary vote statewide ( more in Ann Arbor), and she never did anything later to embarrass us. I was proud of her then and I’m proud of her now.

The next year I worked on the campaign of Ann Arbor mayoral candidate Benita Kaimowitz, the standard-bearer for the newly-minted Human Rights Party, a left alternative to the Democrats and Republicans, who also got about 5% of the vote. The HRP eventually had a fair amount of success in Michigan electoral offices and changed its name to Socialist, but by that time I’d moved to Berkeley, where every candidate claimed to be an authentic progressive, and I lost interest in electoral politics. I could no longer be a five-percenter.

I only rejoined the fray when “progressive” elected officials promoted a ballot measure criminalizing spare-changing by homeless people, an outrageous violation of the First Amendment. We stopped that one in court, but I decided it was time to pay attention to what the progressive label had become.

I recite all of these tedious creds to prove that my reluctance to jump on the Bernie bandwagon is not because I’m afraid to stick my neck out. 

A popular yardstick for evaluating candidates is which one you’d like have a beer with. By that measure, I’ve already vetted ol’ Bernie. I had lunch with him, along with a small assortment of our local self-described progressive officeholders, in our demographic’s equivalent of the neighborhood beer joint—Chez Panisse Café (upstairs, in the cheaper section). Of course I paid for the privilege. 

It was a few years ago, and he was on one of those trolling-for-cash tours that Democrats (excuse me, Democratic Socialists) from the East make in northern California where Republicans are scarce and elections are tepid. 

Bernie fit right in with the Berkeley bunch. I sat between him and the incumbent mayor, whose progressive halo was just starting to fade because of too many deals with developers. The conversation was just what you’d expect at a faculty dinner party—elevated, congenial, intelligent, a tad self-satisfied. 

Based on this encounter, there’s no doubt in my mind that Bernie Sanders is our kinda guy. He’s charming, handsome in a big-old-guy way, articulate, bright—what’s not to like? 

My thirteen-year-old granddaughter might have nailed it. She told her 50-something parents that Bernie seemed to be the candidate for her generation, while Hillary Clinton appealed more to theirs. 

Of course! What kid doesn’t like her grandpa, who comes with pockets filled with chocolates, tells great stories, and seldom says no to whatever she wants? 

Sadly, as you get older you learn that it’s not that simple. 

People like us (most Americans, really) surely want what Bernie Sanders is offering: a completely comprehensive and affordable healthcare system, single-payer in fact; free college tuition for everyone who wants it; a minimum wage of $15/hour; more taxes on the super-rich and enough benefits to elevate everyone else to a decent level. 

Oh, and while he’s at it, how about a pony in every pot? 

I applaud Sanders for setting a standard to which other Democrats and even some Republicans can aspire. The only problem is that under the current dysfunctional government system with a Congress well and truly gerrymandered to favor the conservative Republican minority, he will never be able to reach any of these lofty goals. 

Can Hillary Clinton do any better? Probably not—no, of course not. But you have to admire her for honestly admitting that she can’t. 

The reality is that either of them would be much, much better than the bizarre assortment of alternative candidates that the Republicans are contemplating. There’s just no need for me or anyone else to break their necks campaigning for one or the other of these two candidates in the Democratic primaries. 

One of them will win the nomination and must win the general election—and if they don’t win that one, we’re in real trouble. It will, inevitably, come down to just what it’s always been in most of the elections I’ve voted in over a half century: Hold Your Nose and Pull the Democratic Lever. 

Which is why I skipped watching the encounter in New Hampshire which was televised on Thursday night and went to a concert instead. Radio soundbytes of that show feature Bernie and Hillary hollering back and forth about who’s the real progressive in the race, a pointless endeavor if ever there was one. No word has been so debased in my lifetime as “progressive”, which popped back up sometime in the 70s as an alternative for “liberal”, a term which had been savaged by the Goldwater crowd. Most younger people in that decade had forgotten about (or never heard of) Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party, which in its era (the 1948 election) was in turn savaged by the McCarthyish anti-communists, which is why leftish-ists turned into liberals. 

These days around here the progressive mantle is enthusiastically donned by shills for big luxury developments as well as by advocates for the homeless. The operative analysis is that since everyone who’s anyone is now okay with abortion and marijuana, they must all be progressives, right? 

Yeah, sure. 

Meanwhile, what’s not okay with me is the growing temptation for Sanders fans to disparage the very real achievements of the Obama presidency to bolster The Case Against Hillary. First and foremost, I’m eternally grateful to have had eight years of my adult life with a president who has never embarrassed me, not even once. 

No sex scandals. No actual invasions of obscure countries. No gutting of valuable environmental or financial regs. Open acknowledgement of climate change. 

Yes, Obamacare is not now and never will be Nirvanacare. But lots and lots of people, some of them people I actually know, are now able to get health care that they never could have gotten before Obama, and that’s a miracle. 

When I was in the software business the expression “the best is the enemy of the good” was just gaining currency. Many times I was stuck with the job of demonstrating code that didn’t quite do what it was designed to do, but worked pretty well under the circumstances, and that turned out to be okay. Many functional and useful systems were produced by our customers using that imperfect technology. 

If I had my way, I’d probably opt for a third Obama term, but that’s not an option. 

By the time the late California primary takes place, the nomination will probably be a done deal. I’d been hoping to vote for Martin O’Malley to maintain my status as a five-percenter without doing any actual harm, and of course I already sport the O’Malley for President bumper sticker for obvious reasons. But it looks like he’s dropping out, so I might be stuck with choosing between Bernie and Hillary. 

I guess with the open primary system I could always vote for the Green Party candidate, whose name I can never remember but who seems to be a nice lady. Any time or money I might have for campaigning in the primary will probably be allocated to Sandré Swanson, a stalwart veteran of progressive political action who hopes to replace Loni Hancock as our state senator, and to those Berkeley candidates who seem to be genuine old-school progressives, whatever that might mean, or at least seem to be “Unbossed and Unbought”, the old Shirley Chisholm slogan. 

The last word belongs to Paul Krugman, as it frequently does. It’s advice that I urge on my Berkeley friends, most of whom proudly display “Feel the Bern” buttons, bumperstickers and lawn signs. 

In his New York Times column today, Krugman says this: 

“The truth is that whomever the Democrats nominate, the general election is mainly going to be a referendum on whether we preserve the real if incomplete progress we’ve made on health, financial reform and the environment. The last thing progressives should be doing is trash-talking that progress and impugning the motives of people who are fundamentally on their side.” 

Amen, brother, amen.