As with so many of my diaries, this one began as a comment and then got too long. And it began with a scenario that I have seen over and over… not only in this primary season, but in many election campaigns over the last 20-30 years. Someone asked a Democrat — in this case, a Clinton supporter, but it could easily have been a Gore supporter or a Dukakis supporter or a Mondale supporter, or a supporter of any of thousands of Congressional or state-level offices in all the years during that period — for a good reason, any good reason, to vote FOR their candidate.
And they were told that there shouldn’t need to be one. Why? “Because sometimes, voting against is just as important as voting for.”
They’re right. Sometimes it is. And yet, that whole approach summarizes, for me, what has gone so terribly wrong with the party which has held my allegiance since my childhood, and on which I am just about ready to walk out in disgust this year, if nothing changes.
Because the problem that never seems to get addressed is that, if there is nothing whatever in one’s candidate to vote for, then there is a real issue with that candidate and they should have been ruled out a long time ago. A general election should only very rarely come to a choice between bad and worse; if it does it often, that is a sign that there is something terribly wrong with our own party. Because we know we are going to consider the opposition terrible (that's why they are the opposition). But we consistently keep nominating candidates about whom we can say nothing better in all the world than, “She isn’t as bad as the fascist monster!”
And we act as if this is an okay thing for us to do?!?
It’s not okay at all. This is why we keep losing elections, at all levels of government. This is why Democratic voter turnout sucks, and is getting steadily worse. Because we keep asking people to turn out and vote for people whose only claim to value of any kind is, "I’m not quite as bad as THEY are, so nyeah!” and that's just not going to cut it in terms of getting most people to the polls.
It’s important to know what you’re against. But it's just as important to know what you're for, and to see it reflected in the political leaders you hire to do a job for you. The Republicans are completely loathsome, but they have done one thing massively better than the Democrats, and it is why they are consistently winning, in most of the country, despite the fact that progressive policies poll upwards of 60% in those same Republican-governed states. They have given their base some noticeable, measurable amount of what that base wants. Even if what they give their base is stuff it SHOULDN'T want. Even if it's stuff that mistreats someone else. Even if it’s illegal. The Republicans are unethical ninety ways from Sunday, but they have at least mastered the concept that any politician who expects people to vote for them has to make something happen, while in office, which those voters want to have happen.
It is just not enough, ever, to sit back complacently and say, “Our candidate is going to let the country go to hell in a handcart; but it won’t go there quite as fast, or quite as badly as it would under her opposition. She’ll allow the corporations to keep wrecking your life and our environment; She’ll dismantle the social safety net; She’ll get us into at least one more expensive, indefinite, unwinnable war. She’ll continue letting black people get shot randomly by uniformed government employees on the job and not make the slightest effort to improve matters. Your life will be worse when she finishes her term of office than it is right now. But because it won’t be AS MUCH worse; because she won’t start WWIII, or turn the country into a dictatorship, or put Muslims in a concentration camp, you don’t really have any choice. So we don’t have to exert the slightest effort to please you in any way.”
That has been, not merely Clinton’s entire campaign position, but the campaign positions of the vast majority of Democrats running for office around the country for many years. And it just does not fly. People may come out once, holding their nose, to vote against someone especially hideous; especially if the alternative is from a party which has built up a decent reserve of goodwill capital through former candidates. But they will not keep voting, year after year, for a party which does not show the slightest interest in doing anything to please them, and openly justifies this on the grounds that the opposition is even worse.
What will happen instead is exactly what has happened. People will stay home. In droves. And only on our side. The Republicans don’t stay home, because their candidates actually promise to DO things for them — some of them, even, things they follow through on. They vote, repeatedly, to repeal Obamacare. They slash food stamps. They cut taxes. They pass local laws about who’s allowed to use what bathroom. YES, these things are really stupid and terrible; but that isn’t the point, because those voters don’t consider them so. What matters about them, for this purpose, is that they are items on the voters’ personal agenda, that the candidate took seriously and exerted effort to make happen.
The Democrats have apparently forgotten that basic principle of a republic: an election is nothing more than a mass way to hire somebody to do a job for you. And if you hire them, they are your employee and you are their boss. They are expected to do what you say. They need not invite you to micromanage every detail; but they are expected to interview for the job in the same basic way that prospective employees interview for jobs the world over: by persuading the bosses that they will do what the bosses want done. And then, once hired, by following through on that persuasion — if they expect to get their contract renewed. No employee who doesn’t follow that formula will last long in their profession, be they parking attendant or president.
If Democrats have put themselves, for yet another year, in such a terrible position as to have nothing better to say about their presumptive candidate than, “She’s not as bad as the alternative!” then I fear for us, because the alternative is pretty bad this year, and if we can’t say anything better than that we are likely to lose to him. Note what HE is saying to his prospective hirers! It’s not, “I’m no good, but I’m at least not Clinton!” He’s saying he will do things they want accomplished — he’ll build a wall against Mexico, renegotiate all America’s bad trade deals, and “deal with” Daesh within 30 days. Can he do it? Should he do it? Of course not, on both counts. But at least he is making the basic, minimalist effort to offer the voters something they want in exchange for their precious slice of sovereign franchise.
We are not. If we want votes, that will have to change. Perhaps we have no choice but to ask voters, one last time, to take a deep breath and trust a candidate who shows zero interest in their needs over one who does but is batshit insane. But we must never again put ourselves in a position of needing to make that the most we can offer them.
