#63: We are Going to Make It

Thank you for continuing to share these messages with your friends. If you are not already on our mailing list, please click here to be added to our list. You can also follow me on Facebook where you can read and share these messages. The more people we can reach, the more we contribute to this growing movement. We share these posts on our blog, A Path Forward to November 3, 2020, every two weeks, which means there will be a total of 100 missives before the Presidential election of 2020, in which our country will select a whole new course.

No, Donald Trump, you haven’t been the force behind spending $91 billion to respond to the hurricane’s destruction of Puerto Rico. So far, the U.S. government has spent $11 billion, and you still have a hard time remembering Puerto Ricans are citizens.

No, Donald Trump, you did not invent the Veteran’s Choice program, which expands health care choices for those who served. The law was passed in 2014, before you were president. It was advanced by John McCain and Bernie Sanders, among others.

No, Donald Trump, your father Fred was not born in Germany. He was born in New York City. You claimed that he was born in Germany as a part of a lame attempt to bond with Germans after you had clearly misrepresented their natural gas deal with the Russians. Are we wrong to suspect you always knew where your own father was born?

How to explain not just a dance with the truth, but this complete, intentional, perhaps pathological disregard for the truth? One possibility is that when a person is continually lying to seek political advantage he could either go big or go home. An obvious, provable lie stands out when an elected official pledges to earn and maintain your trust. A score of untruths a day, delivered with bluster establishes that the person doing the lying sees himself as having his own set of rules. 

We are in the process of disabusing Donald Trump of the notion that truth ultimately doesn’t matter if you ignore it every day. Why would a Republican Senator or a Trump supporter anywhere in America stand for this, having rejected chronic dishonesty in all other persons? Only 4 of 10 Republicans believe most of Trump’s claims are true. They don’t call him out because they don’t see the alternative. Or. If they do see the alternative, they fear it. They would rather have someone lie on multiple matters and oppose the Affordable Care Act than tell the truth of these same matters and support the Affordable Care Act.

It does help create our huge opening in November 2020, no? Issues that are hugely consequential to voters will turn on which candidate’s claim they believe. They are more apt to vote for the candidate who protects health care for those with preexisting conditions, which Trump hasn’t; to support the candidate who stands up to Russia, which Trump won’t; and to get behind the candidate who will advance the middle class when it comes to tax cuts, which Trump didn’t.

That’s a good start for our candidates, made even better by Trump’s decision to take another run at the Affordable Care Act. The last run helped us take back 40 seats in the House of Representatives. 

To build upon this excellent start, we need to apply some standards to our own candidates. We have lots of candidates, and lots of good candidates, so we can be choosy. Already, our efforts to sort them out are consequential. To qualify for one of twenty! positions in two rounds of summer debates, candidates have to register at least 1% in three polls or get help from 65,000 donors. These conditions are easy to meet, but they are only the first step in narrowing the field. 

What could our selection standards be?

1. Let’s start by preferring a new generation of candidates for both president and vice president. That doesn’t mean we couldn’t select Bernie Sanders or Joe Biden or Elizabeth Warren, but it would be less likely under this standard. It means that if we can find the right candidates, it would be an excellent time to depend on the next generation, which has already acquitted itself nicely through the presidency of Barrack Obama.
2. We must show our disapproval for any candidate who re-litigates the 2016 battle for the Democratic nomination. This habit of former Clinton or Sanders staffers disparaging each other can be stopped by us withholding support for whichever present day candidate abets that behavior..
3. As discussed in previous missives, let’s go with candidates that have a clear, imaginative, principled policy agenda that reflects Democratic values. One way to check this is by reading their books, already put forward by ten candidates. Even a book that doesn’t say anything compelling will tell you something, in its absence of a vision.
4. Let’s be on the alert for candidates fielding non-substantive criticisms against each other. Obviously Cory Booker is a strong and serious candidate (and Senator) but his criticism of Kamala Harris and Bernie Sanders for “joking” about their pot use is strained. He says it shows they aren’t focused on past sentencing disparities, but he has to know that they are.
5. We can be discerning about the “take down” articles that appear in the media. As in the recent increase in interest in South Bend mayor Pete Buttifieg (and subsequent criticism of him) let’s see where he stands and what he has done.
6. Even though we aren’t going to insist that our candidates have extensive executive branch experience (as in Governors Hickenlooper and Inslee) let’s not forget that what candidates have done so far matters. That fact that Amy Klobuchar and Cory Booker have longer and broader records of service (in both the legislative and executive branches) than Pete Buttifieg and Beto O’Rourke is not inconsequential.
7. Let’s ask candidates not to make broad, unqualified endorsements of sweeping proposals that are addressing critical issues in important ways, but still need work. This includes both the Green New Deal and Medicare for All, which several candidates have fully endorsed.
8. The rapid judgements of social media can cause an accusation to get way out in front of any means of determining whether the accusation is warranted. Let’s expect candidates to support due process. That’s what we all had the right to expect from Kirstin Gillibrand in her unacceptable race to judgement on Al Franken.

As we apply these standards, we could use our evaluations to inform making some donations or doing some early stage volunteer work. Allegiances can be shifted or strengthened as the field narrows. Our immediate efforts matter. We do not intend to pull defeat out of the jaws of victory in 2020. One way to keep that happening is to engage now. Here are three specific ways to do just that.

1) Reach Across the Chasm
	We can win in 2020 without converting a single existing Trump supporter. Nonetheless, it is in the long term interest of our democracy for us to devote more time to understanding the positions of those who disagree with us. This seems especially important on economic issues. As we painfully recall, the firewall did not hold in November of 2016 as we lost Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan. Certainly those losses were partly due to Russian interference and to James Comey’s momentum-reversing announcement regarding Hillary Clinton’s email. However, in these three states traditional Democratic voters were not fully convinced that Democrats were as focused on the economic security of the middle class as was Donald Trump. (This of course leaves aside the subsequent massive evidence that Trump’s voiced concern for the middle class was a ruse.) Our possible common interests in fighting economic insecurity is reason enough to start new discussions with people who feel differently than we feel. Certainly, many of us can find prospects for new conversations among our neighbors, friends, acquaintances and relatives. If we can’t there are a number of organizations that will help us. Time to look into participating in or hosting an exchange through Make America Dinner Again or Living Room Conversations, which has been promoting gap-closing discussions since before Donald Trump was visited upon us.
2) Pay New Attention to the Democratic Party
	Right after the November 2016 election, the Democratic party was lost. The licking of wounds was interminable. It took them months to formulate any strategy for taking back the House. In this period organizations like Indivisible and Swing Left stepped forward to organize the resistance. Now, Democratic party organizations in several states are on the upswing. Even for resisters who do not crave party ties, it is important to understand what this party is doing state-wide and in your local area. You can start by getting on the mailing list of your state Democratic party, or becoming a member.
3) Take Advantage of Swing Left’s New Tools
	In a timely fashion, Swing Left has devised several tools to make certain that all of us don’t wait too long to engage. These are mostly built around a “super-state” strategy that Swing Left believes will enable us to fight gerrymandering, keep our House majority, win back the Senate, and win the Presidency. These states are Arizona, Colorado, Texas, Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Maine, North Carolina, Florida and Georgia. There is plenty of work to do in other states of course, and work to do in super states in the comfort of your own home wherever you are located. It is definitely worth it to download the strategy and find a way to have Swing Left guide some of your efforts. You can even donate to a fund to provide post-nomination dollars to the Democratic presidential candidate. Of course, that would require you to have full confidence in the results on the nomination process. One of the sad truths is that any conceivable Democrat candidate would be superior to the President we ended up with last time we voted.

Yes, it seems like an eternity to November 2020, when we will be done with Donald Trump. It is comforting that it has been 29 months since he was elected, so we are on the down slope. We’re going to make it.

David Harrison
Bainbridge Island, Washington