By Douglas Williams
The Guardian (5/29/17)
In normal times, the Republican disarray in Washington would have people talking about a Democratic sweep at the midterms in 2018. You saw it with George W Bush’s second midterm election in 2006, where a Republican party riven with corruption and weighed down with the Iraq albatross was decisively defeated by a Democratic party on the ascendancy.
But these are not normal times. And in a Democratic party that is seeing their centrist and incoherent governing philosophy being ground into powder, the last thing that they seem ready for is taking power.
The true price of such miseducation will be paid by us all.
One more example of this occurred last week in Broward County, Florida. There, a group of party progressives gathered to hear Sally Boynton Brown, the newly-minted president – a position akin to the executive director position in other state parties – of the state party discuss the Florida Democratic party’s future with them. It, um, did not go well:
“This is not going to be popular, but this is my belief of the time and place we’re in now: I believe that we’re in a place where it’s very hard to get voters excited about ‘issues,’ the type of voters that are not voting.”
According to the Miami New Times, Brown later stated that Democrats should focus on pushing out “identity messages” that connect with “emotional beings” who can “change their lives” with “the power of democracy”. She also stated that the funding of elections is not important, saying: “It’s not so much about the money controlling the conversation; it’s about the people controlling the conversation.”
“I think that a lot of this energy … you are wrong to look at these crowds and think that means everyone wants $15 an hour (minimum wage). Don’t assume that the answer to big crowds is moving policies to the left. I think the answer to big crowds is engaging as much as you can to be as supportive as you can and understanding … what these people want, they are desperate, it’s all about identity on our side now.”
If it is all about “identity on our side now”, then we should check in with those identities to figure out what they want out of their government.
On the issue of single-payer health care – an issue, remember, that the last Democratic nominee for president said would “never, ever come to pass” – 85% of black voters and 84% of Latino voters said that they favor placing the government in charge of managing the health care system in the United States. …
(Commoner Call cartoon by Mark L. Taylor, 2017. Open source and free to use with link to www.thecommonercall.org )