This is a post I started to write many months ago. Some of the information is undoubtedly outdated, and the post is incomplete, but I wanted to share it anyway.
The Democrats are crowing over their victories in the mid-terms, but the progressives are in grave danger of believing that there’s been a major shift in the electorate. Their victory was far more of a wave of anti-Trump sentiment than it was any kind of endorsement of the Bernie Sanders/Elizabeth Warren wings of the party.
They won in large part because they were able to rally a combination of people who usually only vote during Presidential elections (if at all), and college-educated women who discovered that President Trump was actually as bad as he had been portrayed in the 2016 campaign and that he wasn’t going to suddenly develop scruples after he took the oath of office.
The current focus of attention is on the Speakership of the House of Representatives. Rep. Nancy Pelosi is facing a tough battle to regain that title amid a small uprising of newly-elected Democrats who have pledged to vote against her. I’m going to repeat something I said on Twitter recently: I lived in the Bay Area for nearly 25 years and have watched Ms. Pelosi carefully. She’s smart as a whip, an adroit politician, and the best fund-raiser the Democrats have had in several generations. But she’s got the charisma of an aardvark in public. She’s not a hard lefty by any stretch, no matter how much the Republicans try to portray her as such. So, it comes down to a combination of logic and pragmatism. Ultimately, beyond the fact that there’s simply no viable alternative candidate among the current crop of Congressional Democrats, she is simply the best choice for the task.
The next two years figure to be a frustrating period of legislative gridlock. We’re going to see a steady stream of continuing resolutions and budget battles that go nowhere. Little of the Democrats’ policy favorites will ever get past Senate Republicans, much less the President’s desk. And if the Democrats give in to temptation and their investigations are seen as nothing more than partisan sideshows, then the 2020 election will not be the landslide they hope for.
Hardcore activists always overestimate the level of engagement of the voting public. The biggest problem that Democrats will face is explaining why President Trump is unfit for office. The crimes of which this president is most obviously guilty are such that there is no smoking gun. All they’ll have are the esoteric crimes of obstruction of justice and campaign finance violations that are certainly bad, but don’t reek of Nixonian criminality. No 30-second commercial is ever going to portray these issues in a way that will sway the vast swath of the American public that rarely pays any attention to political news.
Yes, I’m here to argue that the Democrats’ best course is to steer toward the middle. At least a little. After all, it’s where the majority of Americans live. People want a decent level of government services to protect them and their families from the ills of the world. Beyond that, you’re just muddying the waters. For decades now, polls indicate that barely a third of the public willingly identify themselves as belonging to either political party. And those numbers are soft. Those most concerned with taxes tend to identify with the Republicans, and those concerned with social inequalities identify with Democrats. If you could craft a platform that conveys the notion of giving everybody a fair shake, you’d win in a landslide. But elections tend to be mud-slinging contests that end up with the majority of voters wishing for a pox on both houses. And whenever the political pendulum swings in one direction, the next election tends to push back in the opposite direction, resulting in little change except in dramatically expanding the Federal deficit since neither side wants to be accused of taking away the goodies that the other guys doled out.