Editorials

Gee whiz! We’re barely two weeks past Election Day, and the Democrats have already formed their circular firing squad. In order, clockwise, we have the dreary Conor Lamb on the right, about at one o’clock. On the left, up there at 11 and counting, we find Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the darling of the left. They’ve both laid claim to the soul of the Democratic party, newly on offer after Joe Biden took back the presidency and six assorted congresspersons lost their seats to Republicans.

As usual, the newsies are eager to turn the circle into a football game: two teams facing each other and fighting to reach the goal on the other side with some combination of cleverness and brute force. A nice demonstration of how this works can often be found in the New York Times, which disgraced itself in 2016 by pumping up a foolish and pointless discussion of Hillary Clinton’s email server into a game-changer in the last week or two of the campaign. Yes, it probably was clickbait, but look what mischief they wrought. 

The current Game of the Week can be viewed as a matched pair of interviews by Astead W. Herndon in recent issues of the NYT: 

Conor Lamb, House Moderate, on Biden’s Win, ‘the Squad’ and the Future of the Democratic Party 

and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Biden’s Win, House Losses, and What’s Next for the Left; 

I’m not going to summarize these two pieces because I find them equally boring. They’re not unique either—you can find similar enunciations of false dichotomies in many online venues frequented by the chattering class.  

Maybe it’s my advanced age, but I see fewer and fewer ideological differences in the never-Trump set, especially the self-styled Democrats, just more and more differences in what can reasonably be called marketing strategies. 

Example: all of them, the Lambs, the AOCs and almost all in between agree that Americans need some kind of government-guaranteed health care. Exactly what form this should take is endlessly discussable, but we can be darn sure that if we ever get it, it will NOT look exactly like any of the proposals now offered by any of the arguing camps. Today’s trendy branding slogans (Single Payer, Medicare for All, etc.etc.etc.) will NOT be attached to the bills that finally succeed. 

Example: Just about any Democratic candidate or officeholder if asked will affirm that Black Lives do indeed Matter. Any or all will agree that in many cases police have made mistakes, sometimes fatal, in their dealings with Black and Brown people, and sometimes even with others.  

But here’s the slogan mistake: Defund the Police. “Defund” is a terrible invented branding word, not ordinary language and therefore subject to misinterpretation.. No, it’s not all about how much police are paid, it’s that what they do badly should be done differently by someone else, regardless of where the money comes from.  

Other top issues: Democrats, probably with no exceptions, tend to agree that science is true, that the CDC should be restored, that we need to defeat Covid, and that national leadership is the way to do it. 

An apparently disputable topic, more apparent than real: Climate Change and how to fix it. Most Dems agree that Climate Change needs action, but how to do it is the question. The hierarchy is something like this: Coal is bad but miners need jobs, natural gas is better and also provides jobs, electric is better still if produced sustainably while employing many, and we must eventually get to Net Zero or even Net Negative. The only hiccup is in states like Pennsylvania which produce natural gas through fracking, but we all know, even Conor Lamb, that we’ll need to phase out petrochemical production eventually. 

And who would ever argue that the same kind of marketing works for both Conor and AOC? Their circumstances are wildly different. He squeaked into a basically Republican district in 2018 on the heels of an incumbent’s sex scandal, and barely held his own this November. He ran as effectively Repub-lite, which is how he won—no surprise there. Contrary to what AOC implied, his loss has very little to do with his use of Facebook and other social media or lack thereof. He’s in a Republican district, for heaven’s sake. 

She, on the other hand, won a primary, not a general election. Primaries are usually easier to win because they have a lower turnout. AOC lives in a solidly Democratic district in which the primary is everything, and she was able to sneak up on the incumbent. Also, she’s a lot younger, smarter, better looking and more charming than her predecessor. 

There’s that apparent difference between a Conor Lamb and an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the issue of climate change, but here, again, it’s really about branding. Her brand name for her stance is The Green New Deal, which plays well in the mostly-Dem context of her district but falls flat in his area, which probably didn’t support the original New Deal, though it’s not as flat as Defund the Police. Fracking’s the only substantive difference between the two (I suspect)--supporting fracking is worth approximately bupkes on AOC’s home turf.  

So what about that “S” word? Socialism, OMG? But I bet it’s not a hot issue in rural PA.  

It’s a no-go, perhaps, but that’s not why Lamb had a close call. In Miami, maybe, but not in the Pittsburg exurbs. 

AOC does brand herself as a Democratic Socialist (oddly the U.S. term for what would be a Social Democrat in Rest of World). Her mentor Bernie Sanders is another one of them, a spiritual descendant of those passionate theory arguments in the CCNY cafeteria in the 1930s. That’s a label which doesn’t frighten many people voting in the Democratic primary in the Bronx in the 21^st century. Youthful energy always sells well: “It’s time for a change” always works. 

And I’m sorry, but I don’t think presence on Facebook counts for much in that district either. But AOC might be correct in her belief that congressional candidates everywhere would have benefited from her help with the kind of technology she espoused in her postmortem Times interview. 

There’s one place where her critique of the internet savvy of the D-triple-C resonated with my political experience. 

I tried, really did, to volunteer for a project this year which was supposed to make it possible for lawyers to give telephone support to people threatened with voter suppression. It was sponsored by the DCCC, and it used three of the worst-designed software programs I’ve ever tried. I gave up on it when a friend reminded me of the catastrophic app which destroyed the Iowa Democratic Caucuses last winter. Are they buying apps from their brother-in-law or what? Not worth the trouble. 

Understand that I’m not against technology per se—I used a computerized database in Ann Arbor in the mid 1960s when most campaigns were still on index cards. After that I worked in a software company for 16 years. 

That’s how I know that pushing high-tech doodads which don’t work does more harm than good. If you’re going to do it, do it right. I suspect that the six Democrats who lost seats in previously Republican districts which they took in 2018 had more problems than not spending $200K on Facebook. 

Much depends on what happens in Georgia in January. If the good guys win by some miracle, they should move as fast as possible to get something substantial done, including fixing what’s wrong with the Supreme Court. If they lose, the next 18 months should be devoted to creating an exemplary program, long on rhetoric but short on specifics, which will appeal to a majority of likely voters despite doctrinal disputes. Then in the last 6 months they should work like hell to make sure that everyone hears about it. 

2022 is upon us already, though many things will change by then. What we have ahead of us should be neither a circular firing squad nor a football game. Campaigns for the Senate and House should be run (and covered) like a marathon, remembering, of course, in the year of the pandemic, that “the race is not to the swift…but but time and chance happeneth to.. all.” Democrats in the next two years must keep their eyes on the prize, roll with the punches, and move on.