Oh, look. It’s Republican John Kasich standing at a crossroads talking about … America being at a crossroads. The former governor of Ohio appeared at the Democrats’ virtual convention Monday to explain to all the Republicans watching why Democrat Joe Biden is the right man to take over the White House after four disastrous years of misrule by Donald J. Trump. He got four minutes. Progressive Democrats were not happy.
Kasich was one of several Republicans the Democratic National Committee saw as fitting salespeople for its brand. Other Republicans followed: former Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Christine Todd Whitman, billionaire Meg Whitman, and former New York Representative Susan Molinari.
What does it say about the party’s leanings that it not only nominated Biden, a moderate, but invited Republicans to the nominating convention to vouch for him? Colin Powell, secretary of state under George W, Bush, received time to do so on Tuesday.
Elaine Godfrey writes at The Atlantic:
Kasich defended his planned appearance in an interview with BuzzFeed News before the convention, noting that just “because AOC gets outsized publicity doesn’t mean she represents the Democratic Party.” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who will be addressing the convention tonight for one minute, responded in a fundraising email: “An anti-choice, anti-worker Republican does not get to decide who represents the Democratic Party.”
Ocasio-Cortez appeared Tuesday night to pro-formally nominate Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders for president. But if not her, who?
Godfrey continues:
That Biden could be more beholden to moderates is a reasonable fear for progressives to have, given the Democratic Party’s changing makeup, says Dave Wasserman, an elections analyst at “The Cook Political Report.” While Sanders and his allies have made significant gains in intra-party policy debates, overall “Democrats have become a more moderate party in the past four years, because there’s a new name for suburban Republicans who don’t like Trump—and that’s Democrats,” Wasserman told me.
Um, maybe. But it was not suburban Republicans who resurrected Biden’s faltering campaign in South Carolina.
Elizabeth Warren and Stacy Abrams won speaking slots, but was that enough? Rebecca Traister was among those upset that the DNC has not given prominent, young progressives more featured airtime at the convention. (Rick Perlstein and Will Stancil took on the Gerontocrats in the Washington Post.) Instead, the party chose to feature 17 “rising stars” whose “major star-making distinction” seems to have been backing Joe Biden early:
Traister wonders if Democrats already leery of upstart young’uns are misreading Biden’s ascension. Fair enough, she writes, voters did pass over “the young, the progressive, the new, and made a beeline for a candidate redolent of America’s past,” so strong was their desire to defeat Trump at all costs:
But I fear that Biden and his cohort have overinterpreted this result, have mistaken his victory as actual enthusiasm for centrist white patriarchy, and not as a temporary (if worryingly familiar) concession to the old in order to win an extraordinary presidential contest.
Just as many centrists like to warn progressives that they cannot extrapolate too much about the nation’s leftist appetites from select victories like Ocasio-Cortez’s, I would argue that it’s a grave error to extract so much about the desires of a Democratic base from Biden’s victory.
But “Democratic base” is a rather contested term, isn’t it? I had a kind of Inigo Montoya reaction to its use here (“You keep using that word…”). Who owns being the Democratic base?
Many voters only participate once every four years. Many of them — Democrats and independents (Republicans even) — vote in open presidential primaries. How to separate “where base Dems are ideologically” from the candidate those voters chose? Strategic calculation? Okay. But does it say anything meaningful about who is the Democratic base?
Progressive activists like to think of ourselves as the Democratic base and the party’s future. But we also speak of black voters and black women as the Democratic base. In South Carolina, they voted for Biden, a moderate white man, and effectively made him the party’s nominee. They are faithful Democrats, sure, but generally not progressive activists in “The Squad” sense. So was that merely a crass, temporary, strategic choice or a reflection of where their faction of the Democratic base really is ideologically? Progressives faced the same strategic calculation, picked Warren and Sanders (both over 70), and lost.
There were many others from Indivisible, a friend observes, plus women young and old, black and white, who supported Biden. Others who have voted Democrat for years wanted Pete Buttigieg. Andrew Yang drew a surprising amount of support. Their supporters all represent the Democratic Party. “Democratic base” will continue to be a contentious frame for some time to come.
What is more important for progressives than prime time speaking slots once every four years is being able to advance their agenda. On that, the DNC’s appeal to moderate(?) Republicans reflected in its speaker choices is not helping move the public needle. The need to prove the party’s bipartisan bona fides is not either. Failing to present more of Democrats’ edgier progressive stars in prime time is not as much a personal slight as a missed opportunity. Democrats as a party keep pulling punches, both hoping for approval and flinching from expected blowback. Appeasement is not leadership.
Anat Shenker-Osorio wrote in The Hill in 2017:
Democrats’ reflexive desire to refashion their appeal to appease even a committed opposition in order to court a mythically fixed middle demonstrates lessons still not learned. The job of an effective message isn’t to say what is popular; it is to make popular what we need said.
Democrats chase public opinion. Republicans change it.
Drew Westen (“The Political Brain“) gave a Zoom webinar at last week’s Netroots Nation conference. He reinforced ideas from his research on effective storytelling that reminded me of this passage from the book:
That story should feel to the majority of Americans like their story. The story of the party and its principles should sound like a natural extension of the story of the nation and its principles. If the master narrative of the Democratic Party doesn’t make 60 percent of the electorate feel at home (roughly the percent of self-identified Democrats and Independents), it isn’t a good narrative. The party’s narrative needs to have enough elasticity that candidates in different parts of the country can draw out its implications in ways that fit their values and those of their neighbors. And it needs to draw on shared sentiments that have become associated with the other party, allowing moderates to cross over without feeling like strangers in a strange land. Democrats believe every bit as much in hard work and personal responsibility as Republicans. The problem is that they rarely say so.
Westen adds a but:
Conversely, if the master narrative doesn’t alienate about 30 percent of the electorate, it isn’t a good narrative, either. About a third of the electorate won’t turn left under any circumstances, and if the Democrats’ story doesn’t make them angry, there’s something wrong with it. A substantial minority of Americans hold authoritarian, intolerant ideologies driven by fear, hate, and prejudice that are fundamentally incompatible with Democratic (and democratic) principles. They are the antagonists of the Democratic story, and if they aren’t antagonized by it the same way liberals are antagonized by listening to George W. Bush’s storytelling, the Democratic story isn’t getting its message across.
Here in the Cesspool of Sin, we shorten that to: If you’re not pissing them off, you’re not doing it right. (Pissing off the Republican base, that is.)
The Democrats’ moderate factions will not tell their story that way. They are too busy trying to get conservatives to like and vote with them. They invite speakers such as Kasich to show off their bipartisanship to people fundamentally opposed to it. Dial-testing shows over and over what Shenker-Osorio and Westen say of successful messaging, that is should engage the base, persuade the middle, and alienate the opposition.
To their credit, there are some edgy messages coming out of the DNC convention so far. But out in the field where the real audience is, Democrats should assign that task to younger members with the guts and the right set of skills.
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