What is a Democrat?
I’m sure there will be a great deal of analysis around the question of what went wrong. Errors will be discussed. This or that group will be questioned. Villains will be identified. The staggering sums of money spent on negative ads in the Philadelphia media market will be traced back to the “Citizens United” decision. There will be, in short, a lot of forensics.
For me, it comes down to Democrats not having a clear sense of who we are as a party, and why voters should vote for us. We’ve fallen into identifying ourselves, not as what we are, but as what we aren’t. Democrats aren’t racists. We aren’t homophobes. We aren’t religious bigots or xenophobic. We aren’t… good at politics.
I’m old enough to remember when it was widely known and accepted that being a Democrat meant being on the side of the little guy. We’ve lost that brand identity. This election we ceded that ground to a wealthy charlatan. A one-dimensional cartoon version of a rich guy. I suppose the silver lining is that we can’t fall lower than this.
After the forensics will come the rebuilding. Eventually, I’ll listen to the acceptance speeches of John Carney, and the other Delaware Democrats who won last night. I’ll be searching to find some foundation for the rebuilding. Some acknowledgment that being a Democrat means being on the side of the little guy.
Jason, this is the huge problem the Democrats are having right now. There are two types of Democrats these days: the Progressives and the Corporate Democrats. The Progressives look out for the little guy. The others… they look out for the corporations. It divided this party. Bernie represented the little guy but Hillary represented the companies. Obama tended to lean towards the companies and America paid a pretty stiff price for that.
Maybe Democrats aren’t a party of “who we are”. Maybe Democrats are (and have been) the party of “Who Aren’t We”. Can that be changed? Perhaps the new party that emerges post-election isn’t coming from a split-GOP. Maybe it’s coming from a split Democratic Party.
I would offer this… We know who we are as a party. I would seriously say that no Democrat, living or dead, who voted this last Tuesday, was ashamed of his party… I would have to admit, even under threat of waterboarding, that the absolute best of everything we ever had to offer, was on the table.
Our problem is that a majority of Americans don’t like what we strive to be. It seems to me that the next 30 year battle, is one of education, countering the 30 year battle that Republicans outlined with Reagan’s ascension. We know FDR’s plan was great. That knowledge stops with us. We know that diversity makes us stronger. That knowledge stops with us. We know its a two way street when working with our global partners. That knowledge stops with us. We know that trickle down is a sham. That knowledge stops with us…
That means what we need to do is to copy the creating of our think tanks to give hand-outs to news anchors. With that is the message we need to create our own network news organization that slanders and shows conservative thinking as counter productive and full of faults. With that is the message of finally beginning our well -funded group like ALEC, a grass roots organization to glean and groom young candidates into a Keynesian philosophy and then fund them into office at grass root levels.
All signs, and I mean all signs, even the tea leaves among the opposition, pointed to a Hillary win. That we didn’t get it, means there is nothing anymore we can do… To move forward from here, we need the world to collapse completely and then, step in and build it up…
Many of you may not remember. The same disbelief swept the nation after we found that Reagan who very much reminds me of what we all said of Trump, beat Carter. Twenty years later that same disbelief swept through us all when we awoke and found that despite unparalleled incumbent approval ratings, on whose coattails one candidate was to coast in on, Florida was too close to call. Both times our nation survived, in part because the new leaders did not get to totally fulfill all their promises… It will survive again…
We have moved from a world modeled in our image, into something brand new.
Respectfully, I think your post title is the core of the issue. Why should anyone care to answer “What is a Democrat?” You are a voter/individual/citizen, not a party. Let the party decide how to build a coalition that includes you, rather than contort yourself to fit what the party wants. And when your ‘regular’ party fails you during an election cycle or an individual candidate, shop elsewhere.
While many of Trump’s voters identify as Republicans, many did not vote for a ‘Republican.’ They voted for their principles. The majority of Republicans did not want Trump as the nominee (a plurality did, but that’s not the same thing).
If there’s a lesson to be learned, it is to support the candidate that best matches your values, not the one that is most likely to be elected. But it may be too soon; there might not actually be a lesson here at all 🙂
“There are two types of Democrats these days: the Progressives and the Corporate Democrats.”
I would offer that there are three types – Progressive, Corporate and Working Class.
The priorities of the Working Class Dems do not align with the priorities of the other two groups. They may generally share beliefs but not priorities.
This article describes why you lost. We are not racist, homophobic, nor xenophobic. I am a white male who has worked for or with black men, homosexual men, non English speaking Latinos, and women with zero issue. Your statements are directly related to Her attitude, and no person that I have ever met appreciates being lumped with such negative connotations, especially when they are lies. I offer you an olive branch because our country and our community needs it. Good luck out there.
I appreciate that sentiment, Josh. thanks for commenting. It is just that Trump wasn’t exactly hiding his agenda.
jfill – thanks for that comment. Those are good points.
Sure you are, Josh. We just elected a white nationalist. No dodging that one. This election wasn’t about policy. It was about white resentment. Unemployment was low, the economy was growing, gas prices were low, the stock market was booming – all under Obama’s leadership, and he got zero credit.
And the end result is that out first black President will hand over the Presidency to a KKK endorsed candidate. That rings out loud and clear.
I am deeply, deeply saddened. I was so wrong about who we are as a nation. We are the comment section of the News Journal.
“We are the comment section of the News Journal.”
I am laughing on the outside, not so much on the inside.
@Pandora
Obama wasn’t on the ballot. I am sure the KKK ( whoever that is) endorses a candidate every election.
Stat, if your point is that Trump isn’t the candidate of racism, even though he was the overwhelming pick of racists, you must agree that he has some work ahead of him to prove that he was just kidding about all the racist stuff (like nationalizing stop and frisk of blacks) he ran on.
What saddens me is that the majority of the folks on this forum could not back a Democrat who policies were to the Right of Eisenhower and instead chose the Delaware way.Always favoring incremental change, stay the course, don’t rock the boat too much, reach out and compromise with someone whose ideology is diametrically opposed to yours as if you could possibly convince them of the goodness of your plan. By taking this path instead of reaching back for what we all recognize was great with America under Roosevelt, you decided that there must be some better, easier way to achieve those goals.
God help this country…
Did Stat just pretend to know who and what the KKK is? What is up with this nonsense?
@Jim C
If you think this election had anything to do with policy, you’re kidding yourself. If you think Dems could have proposed any policy to change these results, you’re kidding yourself. Who knew when Republicans bemoaned McCain and Romney for not being conservative enough, what they really meant was that they should of used racial, sexist, bigoted terms freely. That’s what resonated with whites (sweet lord, we white people own this mess). That’s what they voted for. Policy didn’t matter to them. They voted their resentments. Pure and simple.
The election is over so you can stop playing the race card. When did Trump endorse nationalizing stop and frisk of blacks?
Maybe you were out of the country on business? It was in the Sept. 26 presidential debate when he said he was going to bring back “law and order” by expanding stop-and-frisk policies which he said worked Chicago and New York and were not unconstitutional and didn’t single out blacks. Which they do, and therefor are unconstitutional.
Stop playing the race card? It was the main card Trump played – and white America embraced it.
Too simplistic. Barack Obama carried the largely white working class Macomb County in Michigan in 2012. A county fast changing from red to blue. Trump won it overwhelmingly this year. The white working class voters in the Rust Belt states were never even courted by the Clinton campaign. You cannot win if you do not play.
Of course racism was the weapon of choice. It has been that way for the Republican Party since the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. But that doesn’t explain why it resonated far more this year than in either 2008 or 2012 with an African-American heading the ticket.
So, why did it resonate more this year? Yes, Trump was a more blatantly in-your-face messenger. But the Clinton campaign’s failure to even engage these voters is equally at fault.
And Hillary’s calling these voters ‘The Deplorables’ was like Trump calling Mexicans racists and drug-dealers. Talk about motivating your opposition.
Trump won with less votes than Romney. It wasn’t a wave. It was lack of inspiration.
Despite all the advice from progressives here, Clinton never chose to adopt a positive message about economic growth. If she had spent as much time touting a plan to put the country back to work as she did tut-tutting Trump’s Russian mouth and roamin’ hands, she might have blunted some of his appeal among Reagan — now Trump — Democrats in the Rust Belt. It’s one thing to write off the coal states, quite another to write off the former manufacturing states.
Pandora, sure I am, what exactly? Please tell me what I am.
From Michael Moore, who called this:
“You must say this sentence to everyone you meet today: “HILLARY CLINTON WON THE POPULAR VOTE!” The MAJORITY of our fellow Americans preferred Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump. Period. Fact. If you woke up this morning thinking you live in an effed-up country, you don’t. The majority of your fellow Americans wanted Hillary, not Trump. The only reason he’s president is because of an arcane, insane 18th-century idea called the Electoral College. Until we change that, we’ll continue to have presidents we didn’t elect and didn’t want. You live in a country where a majority of its citizens have said they believe there’s climate change, they believe women should be paid the same as men, they want a debt-free college education, they don’t want us invading countries, they want a raise in the minimum wage and they want a single-payer true universal health care system. None of that has changed. We live in a country where the majority agree with the “liberal” position. We just lack the liberal leadership to make that happen (see: #1 above).”
No. 1 was
“Morning After To-Do List:
1. Take over the Democratic Party and return it to the people. They have failed us miserably.”
https://www.facebook.com/mmflint/posts/10153913074756857
Ugh, you will never get it. The electoral college was/is a stroke of genius by our founding fathers. They understood the diverse nature of our country and devised a way to try and ensure that every group had a voice. Pure democracy is mob rule, and any pure mob rule will oppress any minority. Think lynchings, nazis, armenian genocide, etc. Just go to nytimes.com and view the county voting results and try to tell me that the direction of america would be best decided strictly by 17-20 small geographical areas.
Besides hypocrites, if the roles were reversed, you would be thanking the gods that the electoral college saved us from a trump presidency. I doubt there would be one liberal bemoaning the fact that the election was stolen from trump.