NOW WE ARE WHERE WE ARE

An election that elicits more “Ugh” than “Yay!”

I’m a Roosevelt Democrat, which means I think the purpose of public policy is to help people thrive. I think the Democratic party should stand for the unequivocal advocacy for working people of the United States. That’s why I stand for Medicare for All, tuition free college and tech school, and a guaranteed living wage. While some establishment figures see progressives as usurpers trying to highjack the Democratic party, in truth we’re the Franklins and the Eleanors; they’re the Whitneys and the Duponts and the Morgans.

I also believe in democracy, in the radicalism of Jefferson’s contention that “the only safe repository for democracy is in the hands of the people.” The idea of elites calling the shots feels unAmerican to me.

That’s why for over a year I’ve decried the unwillingness of the Democratic National Committee to allow a real primary to take place, letting voters decide who the 2024 Democratic nominee for President would be. I criticized the DNC’s assertion that somehow they knew best, that the existential threat to democracy presented by Donald Trump was so severe that the decision who should run against him was best left to a small group of Democratic insiders. They basically felt that in order to protect democracy they had to suppress democracy. Their position was maintained by various forms of opposition - most of it unfair - to anyone suggesting that the best way to fight off a threat to democracy was by exercising more of it.

Democrats didn’t really have a primary, so much as a performative exercise in which the power of the political-media industrial complex was put at the service of the DNC’s overt and unapologetically proclaimed goal of making Biden the nominee. From character assassination and blocks to ballot access; to media blacklisting on CNN and MSNBC in a display of profound journalistic malpractice; to PR canards like “when there’s an incumbent, we don’t have a primary,” they succeeded in creating an almost trancelike state among traditional Democratic voters.

It used to be said that Republicans fall in line and Democrats fall in love, but not anymore. Today it’s the other way around. Otherwise thinking adults went around dutifully repeating the notion that “It has to be Joe, it has to be Joe,” though they couldn’t really tell you why other than that the DNC said so! People were successfully convinced that any other candidate was a “spoiler,” contrary to the fact made clear in seventh grade civics class that the concept of spoiler can only apply to a general election and not a primary. Since Biden beat Trump in 2020 he was considered the one to beat him in 2024, an argument completely devoid of logic given that this is a very different year and a very different national mood.

Democratic voters filtered their understanding of how elections should work, who should be considered qualified, and what role the political parties should play not from the US Constitution, George Washington or John Adams, but from highly paid political operatives whose only job was to make sure Biden would be the nominee. And now we are where we are.

For months the polls were shouting that people wanted more choices, yet the voice of the people is routinely shouted down these days by the voice of corporate money. Now there’s the dangerous silence of very little enthusiasm for this election (except among Trump voters), people disgusted by the rematch and many threatening to stay home and not vote. That’s what happens when democracy is leeched of its life force.

The primary was basically curated, engineered on behalf of a corporatized political establishment. The traditional role of a political party is to stand in the background and let voters themselves decide who should be the nominee; only then would the party step forward in support. But that is no longer how things operate; George Washington’s warning that political parties would form “factions of men more loyal to their party than to their country” has come to pass. The DNC even argued in court - successfully, I might add - that as a private corporation it doesn’t owe people a fair election process.

The “inclusive” party has become exclusive. Only members of the establishment were deemed acceptable primary candidates by the DNC and its media cohorts this year, and all those were instructed to stand down and wait their turn. Anyone else, such as myself, was deemed “unserious” - for the sole reason that I was the only one having a deeply serious conversation about where this country actually stands today, the social and economic conditions of the majority of our people, and what needs to be done to heal a wounded nation.

“Biden it will be” was the backroom decision made over clinking glasses. And that was that.

So where are we now? This isn’t about looking at polls or at TV ads or at the millions being raked in at Democratic fundraisers. Mature minds and open eyes can see past all that. It’s about media showing clips of the President’s shuffling walk and muffled, incomplete sentences. It’s about the fact that Democrats are bleeding voters, from our youth to Blacks to Asians to Latinos. It’s about the fact that the Biden-Harris campaign has still not told us one darn thing it plans to do over the next four years to materially improve anyone’s life.

It’s about the fact that we’re watching a slow motion car crash right in front of our eyes, for no other reason that that the Democratic electorate was hoodwinked to think that there really was no other option than the President.

We would be in a whole lot better position today - the President himself would be in a better position - had the DNC allowed a robust primary. I travel a lot these days, talking to thousands of voters all over the country. And while the main political decision-makers in the Democratic Party hang out a lot in D.C., NYC, LA, Martha’s Vineyard and Sun Valley, my advice is that they really need to get out more. For what I see is something that puts a chill up the spine of anyone who would like to see Democrats win in 2024. People are in too many cases more disgusted by the shenanigans of the Democratic party than by the authoritarian threat posed by Donald Trump. The danger to Democrats is not people voting for Donald Trump; it’s people staying home, or voting for independent or third party candidates. If Democrats had simply allowed a fair primary, by the way, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would not have felt the need to leave the party. The geniuses who engineered all this have created the mess that they find themselves in now.

That’s why I have continued to campaign. The rooms are filled, standing ovations are routine, and the energy is electric. I still haven’t gotten to 15 per cent in any of the states where I’m on the ballot, but if and when I do I will have delegates at the Democratic convention in Chicago. I have one more week of appearances and then the rest is left in the hands of primary voters in states that still haven’t weighed in: New Mexico, Oregon, Idaho, Maryland, D.C., Guam, the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico and Kentucky. Although campaign funds are such that we can barely pay for travel, the skeletal staff we have left are incredible pros and our volunteers are amazing. In the face of serious corruption, personal smears and officialdom’s dismissal, we’ve kept on keeping on.

What matters at a moment like this is that the truth be told - everyone’s truth, not just some people’s - and it is a phenomenal honor to have a chance to do that. I feel in my heart that if given half a chance, the American people will take it from there. You don’t do things only if you know they’ll succeed; you something if you know it’s the right thing to do.