When Amy Klobuchar visited New Hampshire during the 2016 primary season, I asked her how she intended to beat a candidate of charisma (Trump) with a campaign of policy.
She seemed stumped, momentarily, and admitted she had never been asked that question, but finally said she thought she had charisma.
What most Democrats seem to think is they can continue to talk about policy (Women's rights to control their own bodies, i.e. to have abortions, transgender rights, gay rights, rights of the disabled, rights of minorities) and they can use this approach to beat the Trump stand in's running for Congress, Senate, state seats, and ultimately, Trump himself.
But, what I hear from so many folks, like the Black cab driver in Chicago, and a White machinist in Lawrence, Massachusetts is nothing about policy. All they talk about is how old Joe Biden is. Or they like that "Trump talks like I do: He talks about shithole countries, and that's what they are, you know? He's just brave enough to say it."
So how do you beat that?
Canvassing door to door for Hillary Clinton, I met enough people who said they would have voted for Bernie but they would not vote for Hillary, and it was the way they said it, the looks of disgust on their faces that really rocked me.
That taught me that if you're going to beat Donald Trump, you'd better do it with something real, and you cannot appear to be parsing your words so as not to offend the gays or the Blacks or the immigrants.
But, of course, Bernie was seen as too radical by too many people.
So what to say?
Well, history may offer some clues.
In 1910, a wealthy American Aristocrat, Theodore Roosevelt, went to Osawatomie, Kansas, where John Brown had battled slavers with the sword, and he spoke about the upcoming election as another battle in that effort to perpetuate the American experiment.
He began by laying down some basic principles:
1. He noted that even Lincoln had observed that in every modern industrialized society beyond subsistence farmers, a struggle between those who produced and those who profited. And Lincoln concluded that "labor is superior to capital."
2. Corporate Greed Over Common Good
Teddy, who lived in a mansion with servants, insisted that property rights must henceforth be secondary to to those of the common welfare, and society should strive to undermine "unmerited social status."
He said, "The essence of any struggle for healthy liberty has always been to take from some men or class of men the right to enjoy power or wealth or position or immunity, which has not been earned by service to his or their fellows." That meant that the corporate elite should not be able to buy votes in Congress.
"The Constitution guarantees protection to property, and we must make that promise good. But it does not give the right of suffrage to any corporation."
(Apparently, SCOTUS disagreed in Citizens United, when it said corporations have the same rights to free speech as individual citizens.)
"The true friend of property, the true conservative, is he who insists that property shall be the servant and not the master of the commonwealth; who insists that the creature of man's making shall not be the master of the man who made it."
That might take a crowd a moment to digest. But then:
"The citizens of the United States must effectively control the mighty commercial forces which they have themselves called into being."
(Does Elizabeth Warren say anything different, when she notes that the man who owns a company which employs workers taught to read and write at public expense, who ships his goods over publicly built roads and pumps his waste into public air owes something to society?)
To this end we need to protect
a/ A graduated income tax
b/ Taxes on inheritance on big fortunes
3. The Rigged System:
With "channels of collusion" between secretive boardrooms and secretive halls of government.."The people must insist on complete and effective publicity of corporate affairs...the use of corporate funds directly or indirectly for political purposes" must be regulated.
4. Ecology:
He went on, as Edmund Morris notes in his Roosevelt biography,
"The great central task of conservation of natural resources, second only to national security," is imperative.
5. Supreme Court Reform:
Essential is Supreme Court reform making the "judiciary accountable to changing social and economic conditions." And we need a judiciary which favors "individual over property rights."
6. Importance of a Strong Central Government
to wit:
a/ child labor laws
b/ workmen's compensation laws
c/ safety and sanitation in the workplace
d/public scrutiny of all political campaign spending both before and after elections.
Note that even as long ago as the turn of the 20th century, in 1910, the wealthy aristocrat, a member of the ruling class saw that campaign finance scrutiny was essential to a functioning democracy.
In 2011, President Obama made the speech available on his White House website.
I would propose that the Democratic candidate who is picked to run against Trump--or any Democrat running against any Trump Republican (a tautology) simply begin by reading the Republican Teddy Roosevelt's Osawatomie speech, and when he is accused of being a communist, an anarchist, a socialist, he can simply shrug and say, "Well, all I'm doing is quoting a famous Republican," and move on.
No comments:
Post a Comment