Party of Cowards

The landslide victory of the Republican party can certainly be traced to a variety of causes. The burgeoning effects of Citizens United certainly had its impact but does not completely explain how or why so many people would vote against their own interests and choose to increase the rolls of a party that has controlled the House of Representatives since 2010 and claims as its only success securing the lowest approval ratings of any Congress since opinion polls came to the fore. It is on many levels nearly impossible to understand how a populace, supposedly sick and tired of the gridlock that has gripped Washington since Barack Obama's election, could vote to change the gridlock  by rewarding those most responsible for that gridlock; increasing the power of the very obstructionists who from the beginning vowed to govern by doing nothing but oppose the President and his agenda. Yet that is precisely what we have done.  Paul Krugman, in his first post-election Op Ed piece, "Triumph of the Wrong", in fact, points to the election as having validated Republicans'  obstructionism as a winning strategy and, indeed, he is right. What is left unsaid, however, is the very real contribution the Democratic party made to its having been placed on the periphery of the political process.

The performance of the Democratic party throughout this and every electoral season since the mid-term elections of 2010 has in a word been cowardly. There is not a single issue that has embraced the nation that the Democratic party has not run away from. Whether it is gun control, the economy or health care, given a choice of standing for the policy and against violence, against intolerance and against greed, Democratic candidates and their managers at the DNC have chosen not to stand for Democratic ideals but to argue  policy on Republican terms. That this is a losing strategy is borne out by the results of the last three elections (save for Obama's own re-election in 2012) which have seen a dramatic shift in the debate and consequently to the make up of the government at virtually every level to the right. 

The nation as a whole appears abjectly blind to the tremendous amount of good that has been accomplished by the Obama administration despite the Republican vow to do everything possible to ensure that Obama fails and is left as an after-thought when Wikipedia recounts this time in history in years to come.

• The economy was brought back from the brink of collapse;
• The auto industry was saved and, along with it, the jobs of tens of thousands of Americans;
• The unemployment rate has dropped from more than 10% when Obama took office to just above 5% today;
• The stock market has climbed more than ten thousand points since 2006 and taken with it the pension plans and 401Ks of millions of Americans;
• The budget deficit has been cut in half;
• Millions of people, previously without health insurance, now either have insurance or the ability to obtain insurance when none was previously available to them

To be clear, there have, in my view, been missteps along the way including some questionable foreign policy decisions but on so many levels so many Americans are better off today than they were six or eight years ago. Yet with perhaps one or two exceptions not one Democrat running for office stood before the electorate and hammered these facts home. Republicans ran this cycle on a strategy of lies and deception claiming that Democratic policies were killing jobs, driving up the deficit and generally destroying the economy, none of which is true. Yet rather than standing up and denouncing the GOP strategy for what it was Democrats, almost to a person, played the GOP game, distancing themselves from the very policies that had benefited the vast majority of the voting public.  In many instances Democratic candidates not only failed to defend these very tangible Democratic successes but insisted that they did not support Obama and should not be blamed for the manufactured failures that their Republican adversaries had conjured up.

Intellectual and political cowardice in the face of obstructionism, lies and deception is not a winning formula at any level and should not be accepted by Democrats who believe that their party should stand for something more. The damage that the Democratic party has done to itself and to the nation by its failure to respond  is incalculable and certain to have a lasting impact that may be nearly impossible to reverse. With several Supreme Court judges nearing the end of their tenure the composition of Congress virtually guarantees that we have not seen the last of the likes of  Scalia,  Alito and  Roberts and make no mistake that it is the Court's pronouncements which have the most lasting impact upon our lives. If you have any doubts just consider for a moment the impact that PAC money had and is continuing to have on the political process.

I write these words in the hope that I am wrong and that my party will gain the courage to stand up and fight. The recent past suggests otherwise. Those who hope for a nation of tolerance and prosperity that everyone can share in have to hope that the Democratic party acts on the moral authority to protect our lives, liberties and our happiness.