Sunday, December 15, 2019

I have been wrong about 2020’s presidential election and I should say so. I had expected that by the end of Super Tuesday (March 3rd this time around), we would see a Democratic party race reduced to no more than four serious contenders: Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and one or two centrists aiming for the neoliberal vote, the old Clinton coalition that has not won a presidential contest since 1996.

That may still be the case, but I was certain that California Senator Kamala Harris would be one of those centrists. I had not counted on the amount of distrust that her role as a law-and-order prosecutor as the San Francisco DA and California State Attorney General would generate among black voters, nor on the amount of residual goodwill those same voters would feel towards my colleague among the Penn professoriate, former VP Joe Biden, the man who gave us Clarence Thomas on the US Supreme Court.  The man who made his bones in the Senate as the rep from Delaware, the state that survives financially on being the pro forma corporate headquarters for many US Corporations.

The inside-the-Beltway punditocracy – an amalgam that lives only in the environs of DC & Wall Street, albeit with a few outposts up Laurel Canyon and Sandhill Road – remains convinced that the Democratic nominee has to be a neoliberal because they recognize (rightly) that Obama in action was one of their own. This means neglecting the glaring detail that Obama only beat Hillary Clinton in 2008 by convincing voters that he was a progressive candidate, running as the antiwar alternative to neoliberalism. Appointing Clinton to become his Secretary of State turned him into something very different, one of the great bait-and-switch artists of all time. It also ensured the failure of his foreign policy and guaranteed that his successor would almost inevitably be a Republican, any Republican. And any Republican is what we got, Putin’s hand-picked protégé, Donald J. It still took a massive voter suppression and misinformation operation to enable Trump to pull out a narrow win while being outvoted by some 3 million ballots nationwide. These days, that sad package is what the GOP likes to call “the will of the American people.” I have to swallow my vomit every time I hear that phrase.

Hillary Clinton did herself no favors by running a dreadful campaign, picking the whitest of white male running mates (thus aiding and abetting GOP efforts to suppress the African-American vote, which made all the difference in Philadelphia, which went for her by the same percentages that it had given Obama, but far fewer actual votes that were then overwhelmed by the angry white rural vote Trump turned out with gusto in that central Pennsylvania domain everyone here calls Pennsyltucky), while perpetuating the neoliberal disdain for working people in general. Had she picked Corey Booker or Julian Castro, she would be president today and the Russian mischief would have been just that. She might even have gotten away with Al Franken or Sherrod Brown. But Tim Kaine and here we are.

That was then, this is now. I still expect the post-Super Tuesday race to telescope down to Bernie, Liz and some neoliberals. That latter group will most likely include Joe Biden, Mayor Pete Buttigieg and one or two billionaires. Unless Sanders and Warren come to some agreement in advance of the Democratic Convention, that is a prescription for a brokered convention. And my gut tells me that the candidate who would emerge from a brokered convention just might be Hillary Clinton.  Are you ready to relive that nightmare?

Me neither. Fortunately, it is plausible that Warren and Sanders might have, between them, enough votes from the primaries to constitute an absolute majority of delegates at the convention and thus shortcut that scenario once and for all. In California, for example, the polls currently show them running one and two, with Biden third, Buttigieg fourth and (pre-dropping out) Harris fifth. It was the prospect of coming in so low in her own home state, which would have derailed not just her national ambitions  but conceivably her electability to her current gig (she ran unopposed in the primaries for her first term, replacing Barbara Boxer, handpicked by the same behind-closed-doors process that the late Phil Burton and Willie Brown engineered in the 1960s and that only Dianne Feinstein has ever successfully sidestepped*) that prompted Harris to quit when she did. Any later and she would have been on the ballot on Super Tuesday.

Warren and Sanders may not love one another, but they are rational actors – not something that can be said of every presidential candidate – and I have some faith that they would consolidate their delegates to fend off a neoliberal if they hold a majority. If they don’t, however, it will be a scramble among the neolibs to see who can attempt just the opposite.

Joe Biden is the chicken-soup-for-your-soul centrist, and it is conceivable that he could prevail in a contest where the nation has grown weary of the constant chaos of Trumpism. I take most of his verbal stumbles and gaffes to be the consequence less of aging and more of his vestigial stuttering, but when he opts for another word that he can pronounce in lieu of one that is not coming, he too often reveals where his psyche actually wants to go. He has never been a progressive. A Biden presidency would not just be a one-term deal (hello Nikki Haley or Jim Jordan 2024), it would mean putting off serious action on subjects like climate change and white racism for four more years. We don’t have four more years we can wait. It is plausible that the black community’s willingness not to hold what Biden did to Anita Hill against him could last to November, but I suspect that some mysterious hacker in Minsk will do a lot to remind us of every bit of baggage Joe has and it’s enough to fill up the Acela to DC.

Buttigieg wants to be the Obama of 2020, but he’s not pretending to be a progressive except by identity. His service record and South Bend creds do him some good with midwestern voters but folks who think his background as a McKinsey consultant qualifies him for squat have never met a McKinsey consultant. In the business world, it’s an act that only goes over with the easily impressed. Still he may be the only candidate at the convention under the age of 60.

The one other non-septuagenarian who might still be there is self-funded Tom Steyer, who will turn 62 in June. I say might because it’s clear that he has the money to do so, but he will have very few delegates and it’s hard to imagine what he does after the US Senate declares Trump to be as innocent as the driven snow on his impeachment charges.  What Steyer will be running for after his signature issue is cast asunder by Moscow Mitch is hard to imagine.

Similarly hard to imagine is the other billionaire vanity candidate, ex-GOP mayor of New York City Mike Bloomberg, Manhattan’s answer to Donald Trump (he ran the city five days a week from an office within walking distance to Wall Street and spent his weekends in the Caribbean, although he is rumored to have visited some of the other boroughs in the runup to his elections). While he does seem to be serious on gun violence, he knows he could do much more for America simply by acquiring Fox and turning it into something more akin to the Wall Street Urinal by requiring that it, at least periodically, tell the truth. And, although I think he could get some delegates through his campaign to spend big and gather endorsements from urban mayors, I think his real goal is to ensure a brokered collection – I’m not sure he will accomplish even that since he will only draw from the Democratic party’s right. Ain’t no way progressives are going for Uncle Stop-n-Frisk.

The current neoliberal talking point is that Corbyn’s crashing defeat in the UK “proves” that a progressive candidate would be a disaster against populist Donald Trump in the US. But what doomed Corbyn was his muddled position on Brexit and the leftopian fantasy that he could make the election about social services. It was a one issue election and he was fundamentally unclear on that issue. The US election will be a one-issue election also, Trump or no Trump, and all Warren’s gazillion plans and Bernie’s left-populism in the name of socialism do is rally their part of the left for the nomination.

In one sense, the more concrete and comprehensive Warren is before the election, the more like voters will be confused by the blizzard of inside-the-beltway thinktank attacks on every one of her plans after it. Although I’m a DSA member (and DSA endorsed Bernie a year before it needed to), I prefer Warren because (a) America could really use a woman president [I mean seriously], (b) she’s nine  years  younger than Bernie, in better health and the third youngest of the contenders and (c) I like plans, I really do. But the DSA argument that Bernie is the stronger candidate is not unreasonable. I would vote for any of the other candidates against Trump, but recognizing that this means putting off progress on climate change, gun violence, income inequality and the rest of the must-do-right-now issues that have been festering ever since Bill Clinton sold the Democratic Party to Goldman Sachs back in 1992.

So we had better hope that 2020 is a change election and that the Dems don’t self-destruct through Wall Street’s desperation to head off progressives. A brokered convention gives the presidency to Donald Trump. And the only way Biden wins will be if Trump-derangement-syndrome has given enough of the country PTSD** to make chicken-soup-for-the-neoliberal-soul a viable position. Color me unconvinced.

*     Did I mention that it was Burton’s widow Sala who hand-picked Nancy Pelosi to be her successor to Congress or that Harris used to date Willie Brown, or that Boxer got her start working for Phil Burton’s brother John? Feinstein, the accidental SF mayor due to George Moscone’s assassination, was never opposed by Ye Olde Burton machine though neither side particularly likes the other. Currently, Pelosi and Governor Gavin Newsom appear to run that operation and Newsom, whose father owed his judgeship to it, may be kicking himself for not running in 2020, empty suit that he is.
**   Every therapist I know is fully booked going forward because of this very real phenomenon.