Wayne O'Leary

Donkey Kong

Democrats are lucky in the extreme heading into the 2020 presidential election. They’re running against Donald Trump, the worst president by far in the nation’s history, a candidate for reelection who has no business being either in the White House or on a national ticket. To call him beatable would be the understatement of this or any other political year.

In addition, the Donald is presiding over a country that’s experiencing its worst economic trauma in nearly a century, with job losses, home evictions, and business failures of historic proportion. The state of the economy and Trump’s inept response to it can only be called Hooverian. Throw in racial turmoil, the unaddressed climate crisis, and the foreboding overlay of a worsening pandemic, and you have the makings of a no-win situation for the Republicans and a can’t-lose scenario for the Democrats.

Trump’s only hope will be to successfully steal the upcoming election through voter suppression and the like, something he and his party are fully capable of attempting (and our Electoral College system perversely facilitates); they have nothing to lose, as they contemplate the prospect of years in the political wilderness. Of course, there’s always the fascist temptation, which the administration has been toying with for some time; that is, nullifying democracy and permanently seizing the government, daring opponents to do anything about it. I doubt they could pull this off, but you never know.

In conventional terms, then, failing 1930s-style street warfare, the Democratic Party is positioned to sweep the country. Still, it’s fortunate to be facing Trump and not a competent GOP leadership, because it has issues of its own, having tied its fortunes to radicalized social movements of uncertain popularity (riding the proverbial tiger) and having bet the farm on a chancy and experimental virtual convention.

Notwithstanding the cheerleading distaff team of MSNBC commentators — Michelle Obama’s mundane remarks were “a speech for the ages,” according to Rachel Maddow — watching the Zoom convention was a Chinese water torture at times, and viewership was down substantially. Really bad music, apparently aimed at younger voters, combined with reams of verbal platitudes and piles of personal anecdotes to periodically induce an overpowering urge to doze off or change the channel, even among confirmed political junkies.

Emotionalism was the order of the day, incorporating heartfelt tributes to Middle Class Joe, and in that respect the convention succeeded. There were some good speeches. Barack Obama was his usual articulate self, presenting a convincing case for the “clear and present danger” posed by Trump and delivering it in an urgent fighting style not normally associated with him. Joe Biden rose to the occasion with perhaps his best ever speech (the best I’ve heard), allaying some of the doubts about his capacity to lead. Kamala Harris was a disappointment, but speechifying is, after all, not why she’s there.

Harris is our first affirmative-action candidate for vice president (a bad precedent), picked to check off certain boxes (female, black, Asian-American) for a party totally immersed at this point in identity politics. She ran a poor presidential campaign and finished badly, but that didn’t matter. Her apparent ability to annoy Trump and her lawyerly prosecutorial skills were enough to attract Biden, and his debt to African-American voters in the South sealed the deal.

If blacks and women were overwhelmingly featured at the Zoom convention — it appeared at times like the annual meeting of the National Organization of Women — certain other groups were not. White males were conspicuous by their absence, having seemingly been shown the door (and don’t let it hit you on the way out) by the Democratic National Committee, which organized the proceedings. Also significantly underrepresented, shockingly so, were Hispanics, who despite their numerical and strategic importance were given few speaking slots, a reflection, perhaps, of their early prominence in the Sanders campaign.

Among those slighted by the convention’s powers-that-be were the Democratic progressives as a group. There was evidently a concerted effort to push the left of the party to the periphery and marginalize it, part of the establishment’s perennial quest for nondescript (and probably mythical) “swing” voters. The fine hand of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, who as head of the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee recruited and funded almost exclusively centrist or “moderate” candidates this year, was no doubt strongly active behind the scenes.

Oh, Bernie Sanders did get his nine minutes as the first-night warm-up act for Michelle Obama, before receding into the background — gracefully, as even James Carville acknowledged. But for someone who finished second twice for the nomination, inspired millions, founded a movement, and charted a future direction for the party, it almost qualifies as shabby treatment.

Speaking of shabbiness, the one minute allocated to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, universally hailed as a coming progressive star, was almost an afterthought compared to the extensive play given to numerous anti-Trump Republicans (among them John Kasich, an anti-union tax cutter who champions the balanced-budget amendment) — to say nothing of part-time Democrat and full-time billionaire Mike Bloomberg. This carries the concept of a “big-tent” party to ridiculous extremes; if Democrats stand for everything, they stand for nothing.

One final observation on the Democrats’ coming-out party: By picking Kamala Harris as veep, Joe Biden has anointed her as the presumptive Democratic nominee for 2024, the assumption being he will serve only one transitional term. This is a potentially fatal blow to hopes for an economically based progressive-populist politics looking beyond the current obsession with “diversity.” Harris, no insurgent, is a party insider and a classic centrist with no fixed philosophical moorings; she’s someone who can slide easily from one side of the political spectrum to the other and back, as her slow-motion moon walk from supporter of Medicare for All to opponent (just in time for the v.p. nod) illustrated.

Nevertheless, for now, it’s Joe Biden’s Democratic Party, which begs the question of who Biden is these days politically. Will he run a compromising (and ultimately futile) bipartisan “unity” administration in the mold of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, or try to forge a left-leaning new New Deal patterned after FDR? The evidence is mixed. In the meantime, there is no choice other than securing his election. The alternative is too grim to contemplate.

Wayne O’Leary is a writer in Orono, Maine, specializing in political economy. He holds a doctorate in American history and is the author of two prizewinning books.

From The Progressive Populist, October 1, 2020

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