PRISMATIST

Just saw a communication that charged Pennsylvania with being “full of stupid people.”   Here’s what I think may be true instead, followed by some suggestions for how to start digging out.   

Either a great many stupid people have recently moved into Pennsylvania or some rare (we hope) brain worm from Little Bobby Kennedy has got loose.  Otherwise these Pennsylvanians are almost all the same people who voted for Biden in ’20 and elected a Democrat governor and US Senator and House delegation in ’22.  It is much more likely that the stupidity rests upon the furrowed brow of the Democratic Party.  Everyone agreed that these elections were the Democrats’ to lose, but most of us were surprised at how diligently they went to work to do just that.  

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[SKIP TO THE NEXT HEADING IF YOU HAVE BECOME UPSET AT THAT GRAF.]

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Consider:  The party’s poobahs now know they should have taken the car keys away from Grandpa two years ago, but just about everybody else has known it for, let’s say, two years.  Maybe more.  Would have been tricky and possibly unpleasant, but they needed to go to him and say, “You have had a very distinguished career in public service, but it’s time to go away.  If you don’t do it voluntarily, we will all loudly and publicly support somebody else for the nomination in ’24.  Might not even be the same person, but it won’t be you.”  This has never happened to a sitting President except Franklin Pierce in 1856, but too bad.  Grandpa should have given the VP a lot more substantive work to do, but couldn’t bring himself to do that either.  At least when she was reluctantly accepted as the party’s nominee she mightn’t have been polling even worse than the Aged Incumbent.  That’s on Grandpa, though. and not the party.

 

For approximately ever, the Democrats have been steadfastly refusing to recognize the need to attend to the folks who came out behind in the globalization era.  Instead they did some token stuff and spent the rest of the time explaining what a good idea it all was.  It was, of course, a Really Good Idea, but nobody who got hurt was going to accept an explanation instead of concrete help.  This was going on for a really long time before this election, and it kept festering.  

​Even before the campaign season hit full stride, polls were saying the top issues were immigration and inflation.  The D policy people responded to this by explaining that those things were not actually problems (which was true but irrelevant) and implying that you were prettydam dumb if you wasted time thinking about those instead of the Trumpian threat to democracy and the ill-treatment of lots of largish subgroups in American society.   People rarely respond well to being called stupid or just wrong, even (or perhaps expecially) if they are.

So, the Ds wheeled out the Pronoun Police and the Gender Defenders and the Democracy Death Watch instead.  These were and are deeply worthy of public attention, but they weren’t what most voters were thinking about—they came in about fourth or fifth on the list of people’s concerns, even in the increasingly flawed polling results.

 

Bernie Sanders is wrong about most stuff and strange about most of the rest, but he nailed this one:  The Ds lost because they were no longer in touch with actual people.  They probably lost this election at the moment they  turned the party over to the Coastal Crazies.  (This happened, in case you were wondering, when that kid with the initials from the New York 14th beat a thousand-year old incumbent in the primary in 2018 and was immediately crowned the future of the party.  She may be that, but the future is not now.  The Ds decided instead that she and her band of merrymakers should lead the policy charge along with their patron saint, Bernie Sanders.  They became increasingly unmoored and were allowed to drag the party along.)

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Even the abortion issue, which was and is real, got played wrong.  Until Dobbs, they had won very few national-office elections on the abortion issue.  After Dobbs in ’22 they decided abortion was a permanent winner, forgetting that amurrican voters have no attention span to speak of and that this question seemed to be getting dealt with, more adequately or less so, for the moment at the state level.  So they began to ask the musical question, “When I can’t afford a new car or even gas for my leafblower, why do I care about abortions I’ll never need or democracy that doesn’t seem to help me?”  We are not, as folks have noticed many times in the past few centuries, a country with much sense of history or philosophy or even logic.  This is unfortunate, but you might reasonably expect candidates and staff seeking large offices to recognize and adapt to it.

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The Veep almost started out right, though.  Voters were tired of doom and gloom and temper tantrums, and would like something to look forward to in the future.  However, with a flawless tin ear she started banging on about joy instead of hope.  Voters did not want to see the Ds having a lovely time—they wanted to know what they could hope for if they voted for that party.  Having no time to put together a coherent platform (thanks again to The Aged Incumbent) they reverted to platitudes and happytalk.  And with no hints about how a Harris administration would be better than, or even different from, what Biden had been doing.  Now, what Biden had been doing was actually quite good, but by the time he gave up the car keys the other team had firmly planted the idea that things were awful. 

 

And the VP made the Humphrey mistake.  For some reason most US vice-presidents act like they are the president’s employees instead of the only individuals in the entire government that the president can’t sack.  So she dutifully didn’t say anything she would have done differently until it was far too late and far too vague.  Further proof, if any were needed, thatis no substitute for political courage.  

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Toward the end it just got silly.  If you are going to call your opponent a fascist (a fair rap in the circumstances) you don't start a week before the election, and you can’t be the first or even the second or third one to say it.  You have your ankle-biters start and it works its way up the ladder until everybody has said it except the candidate. Then the candidate says it.  Otherwise it sounds as outlandish as the stuff the other team has been saying all along. 

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THE NEXT HEADING

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Everybody has a bad election sometimes, and maybe often.  As with any losing effort, the lessons you draw from it matter.  When you win, you never learn anything—or if you do, it tends to be the wrong thing-- but losers need to think about The Next Time, in case they are granted one. 

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The losers always spend a certain amount of time trying to blame someone else, and they need to get that out of their systems.  Yeah, the press fell down on the job.  Yeah, the Aged Incumbent should have gone away sooner.  Yeah, the other party could have been more, shall we say, civil.  

Often the losers start out saying they need to double down on the most extreme bits of their program.  This almost never works, and it is almost certainly not true that the Ds lost because they didn’t tack enough to port.  In the US, centrist parties usually do better.  If there had been one presenting a coherent program early in this cycle, things might have gone differently.  Or not. 

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The next resort is to blame the voters for not seeing the right thing to do.  That way lies madness.  Advocating for democracy while excoriating the voters’ decisions is not persuasive.  So eventually the Democrats and the surviving real Republicans will need to settle down and get to work.  But don’t push them—some of them are taking this very hard. and won’t be able to function for a while.

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I don’t have any ideas for a grand strategy, but there are a lot of things we can all work on over the next few years that may help get us back on a good path.  

Before first, stop referring to members of the other party as evil, stupid, crazy, or even ill-informed.  This is especially important if any or all of those things are true.  Being a Republican or even a Democrat is not clear and convincing evidence of stupidity.  

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Now, first: Stop saying “four years.”  In two years the entire US House and a third of the Senate have to stand for election or re-election.  While the Prince of Orange and his minions can do a lot of damage in two years, they can do more in twice as long.  It is really unlikely that they can do anything in two years what will make it impossible for a new Congress to improve things a bit, or at least to stop the bleeding.

  

Second, enroll in a party if you’re not in one already.  In the US it doesn’t cost anything and they can’t kick you out.  This gives you a voice if you want to use it in the party’s councils, or at least a vote in the party’s primaries.  I stay Republican because New York has the very sensible closed primary system, unlike the zany open one else in which the parties let other people pick their candidates and leaders.  

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Third, stop donating money and time to one of the national parties or their offshoots..  Save it for the down-ticket candidates, for a couple of reasons:  The national leadership in both parties are the ones who have lost touch with actual voters and have been running lunatic campaigns with your money.  For my gang, they listen only to their Earless Leader.  For the Ds they listen only to each other.  Neither is, shall we say, ideal. 

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The other reason is because you have a better chance of getting to hear directly from the candidate the further down the ticket you go.  You’re more likely to discover what they’re really like than you can discern from a campaign flyer or a t.v. advert.  Actual knowledge is often useful in making a decision.

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Fourth, build up the bench.  While the Ds were spending most of their time trying to get to be presidents and members of Congress, the Rs were filling up school boards, city councils, state legislatures, state election officials, judgeships, and–well, you get the idea.  They ended up with lots of folks who were experienced in both the electoral and administrative arenas, and were often in a position to advance the party’s agenda in their offices.  Think about all the secretaries of state and attorneys general who can either move things along or gum up the works.  They were not born to those offices.  So work for and fund the down-ticket candidates.

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As part of this, vote and encourage others to vote in every state and local election.  We have entirely too many special-purpose  governments and separate elections for them, but that’s how political careers often get started.  Maybe even run for something yourself.  The hours may be long, but at least the pay is lousy.  If there is any.

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Fifth, do not support third parties in any way, even by signing petitions to put them on the ballot.  Third parties can work in a parliamentary system, but not in a presidential one.   They are at best a distraction and at worst a disaster.  EXCEPTION:  Occasionally a real third party does get started, but not by a lot of characters getting together in January for a November election.  In the US it has been a long hard slog, starting with a successful regional organization.  And then when that group becomes pretty successful, one of the two big parties takes over its issues.  This makes the third party’s members sad, but their programs usually benefit from the higher level of attention and funding.

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Sixth, do try to remain calm whenever possible.  Remember what the Buddha said:  Nothing lasts forever. Except the hockey playoffs.