1/21/20: A Moderate Proposal
The second part of my analysis of the NYT's endorsement, and a note about the sensible moderate.
(Photo via New York Times.)
Programming note: I’ve decided this newsletter will be a biweekly (meaning twice per week, not every other week) affair, but I of course reserve the right to go over that if something crazy happens — which, let’s face it, will happen. Generally, I’ll have one per week more focused on elections (which will probably be every Tuesday from here on out, as that’s typically Election Day) and one more focused on the media. Also, this newsletter has its own Twitter handle now! Follow it at @politicsandpro1.
This is the second part of my look at the New York Times’s editorial board endorsement. You can read the original here, and part 1 of my analysis here. Anyways, let’s pick up where we left off:
THE LACK OF A SINGLE, powerful moderate voice in this Democratic race is the strongest evidence of a divided party. Never mind the talented, honorable politicians who chose to sit this fight out; just stop and consider the talents who did throw their hat into the ring and never got more than a passing glance from voters — Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Steve Bullock, Michael Bennet, Deval Patrick, Jay Inslee, among others.
I mean, there is one: it’s Joe Biden, and he’s been a frontrunner — if not the leader of the pack — since the day he announced his candidacy.
It’s also interesting how the Times frames the electorate passing up on, say, Steve Bullock with the triviality of a Chicago Bears fan chiding his team for not drafting Patrick Mahomes. Come on, look how talented he is! How could you not go for him? Never mind the fact that Mahomes is a better quarterback than Bullock was a candidate; unless you’re Adam Sandler in Uncut Gems, a sports team’s personnel decisions are not made with your life in the balance. Your choices in the voting booth are, however, and I would love to see a member of the editorial board go up to someone rationing insulin because they can’t afford it to berate them for not considering voting for Deval Patrick. Politics is not a game: it’s millions of people’s existences at stake.
I don’t think the Times acted maliciously — I think they just resorted to the same tried-and-true tropes that have plagued so much mainstream political writing and reporting.
Speaking of sports metaphors:
Pete Buttigieg, who is 38 and who was elected mayor of South Bend, Ind., in 2011, has an all-star résumé — Harvard graduate, Rhodes scholar, Navy veteran who served in Afghanistan, the first serious openly gay presidential candidate. His showing in the lead-up to the primaries predicts a bright political future; we look forward to him working his way up.
A real blue-chip prospect, that Pete Buttigieg. I wonder what his 40 yard dash time is.
Sure, Buttigieg’s resume is impressive on paper. It doesn’t, however, give an iota of understanding into what policies he would enact as president. Sure, he’s a wunderkind now, but he’s gonna get older. What will he be then?
On to Bloomberg:
Michael Bloomberg served three terms as New York’s mayor (and was endorsed twice by this page). A multibillionaire who built his namesake company from scratch, he is many of the things Mr. Trump pretends to be and would be an effective contrast to the president in a campaign. Mr. Bloomberg is the candidate in the race with the clearest track record of governing, even if that record has its blemishes, beginning with his belated and convenient apology for stop-and-frisk policing.
Still, Mr. Bloomberg’s current campaign approach reveals more about America’s broken system than his likelihood of fixing it. Rather than build support through his ideas and experience, Mr. Bloomberg has spent at least $217 million to date to circumvent the hard, uncomfortable work of actual campaigning. He’s also avoided difficult questions — going so far as to bar his own news organization from investigating him, and declining to meet with The Times’s editorial board under the pretext that he didn’t yet have positions on enough issues. What’s worse, Mr. Bloomberg refuses to allow several women with whom he has nondisclosure settlements to speak freely.
A right of center New York City billionaire versus a right of center New York City billionaire in a presidential election would be a compelling election cycle, if only because it’d likely be the best chance in out lifetimes of a third-party candidate winning a state — even if that candidate is Tulsi Gabbard, and those states are only Vermont and Hawaii. In all other aspects, it would be a horrific illumination of the structures of power in this county. Hell, substitute “billionaire” for “millionaire” in my first sentence, and you pretty much have the 2016 election. People even thought Evan McMullin could win a state.
“Clearest track record of governing” does a lot of work in this opening paragraph, especially when used in conjunction to explain away stop-and-frisk, a racist, ineffective and illegal policy, as the Times’s own reporting elucidates. And the notion that Bloomberg, a billionaire who was mayor of our nation’s largest city for 11 years, does not have a coherent position on enough issues to face the Times’s editorial board is absurd. Why, then, is he running for president? And why is the Times mentioning this as an aside, rather as a disqualifying factor? Either Bloomberg is a liar, or especially ill-equipped to run for President. If there’s anything clear about his track record, it’s that both options are plausible here.
Okay, what does the board think about Biden? Let’s read on:
Few men have given more of their time and experience to the conduct of the public’s business than Joe Biden. The former vice president commands the greatest fluency on foreign policy and is a figure of great warmth and empathy. He’s prone to verbal stumbles, yes, but social media has also made every gaffe a crisis when it clearly is not.
As In These Times’s Sarah Lazare pointed out, “fluency” is a ghastly word to use to describe Joe Biden’s foreign policy record, given that includes support for the Iraq War. Warmth and empathy are values at loggerheads with that of nation-building.
Mr. Biden maintains a lead in national polls, but that may be a measure of familiarity as much as voter intention. His central pitch to voters is that he can beat Donald Trump. His agenda tinkers at the edges of issues like health care and climate, and he emphasizes returning the country to where things were before the Trump era. But merely restoring the status quo will not get America where it needs to go as a society. What’s more, Mr. Biden is 77. It is time for him to pass the torch to a new generation of political leaders.
Good news, then, that Amy Klobuchar has emerged as a standard-bearer for the Democratic center. Her vision goes beyond the incremental. Given the polarization in Washington and beyond, the best chance to enact many progressive plans could be under a Klobuchar administration.
First off, as the rest of this editorial is about Klobuchar (besides a trite conclusion, which I’ll also get to), I must ask: why didn’t Tom Steyer get a mention in this article? Both RCP and FiveThirtyEight polling averages have him just a hair under Klobuchar. The board at least chose to dignify Yang and Bloomberg by explaining why they weren’t getting endorsed. Steyer didn’t even get that. Poor billionaire.
As I mentioned yesterday: what is the Times’s definition of progressivism, and how does Amy Klobuchar fall under that? The Times implies that it is a departure from the status quo, in their reasoning for why Biden is not their preferred candidate. But while “not Joe Biden” is a good colloquialism, it’s far from a political movement. So, what does Klobuchar bring to the table that Biden doesn’t have — besides two fewer decades of life and a different gender? Let’s find out:
The senator from Minnesota is the very definition of Midwestern charisma, grit and sticktoitiveness. Her lengthy tenure in the Senate and bipartisan credentials would make her a deal maker (a real one) and uniter for the wings of the party — and perhaps the nation.
She promises to put the country on the path — through huge investments in green infrastructure and legislation to lower emissions — to achieve 100 percent net-zero emissions no later than 2050. She pledges to cut childhood poverty in half in a decade by expanding the earned-income and child care tax credits. She also wants to expand food stamps and overhaul housing policy and has developed the field’s most detailed plan for treating addiction and mental illness. And this is all in addition to pushing for a robust public option in health care, free community college and a federal minimum wage of $15 an hour.
Ms. Klobuchar speaks about issues like climate change, the narrowing middle class, gun safety and trade with an empathy that connects to voters’ lived experiences, especially in the middle of the country. The senator talks, often with self-deprecating humor, about growing up the daughter of two union workers, her Uncle Dick’s deer stand, her father’s struggles with alcoholism and her Christian faith.
Here’s the thing, though: none of this matters. A moderate, sensible Klobuchar agenda has — barring dramatic institutional change — as much chance of becoming law as a radical, pie-in-the-sky Warren or Sanders one, so long as there are enough Republican votes in the Senate to sustain a filibuster. Don’t take my word for it, take Mitch McConnell’s. Better yet, take his actions. Barack Obama couldn’t get it done with vast majorities in both chambers of Congress and as much of a mandate to govern as any President since Ronald Reagan. Amy Klobuchar isn’t going to do it by regaling the Senate Republican Caucus, or their constituents, about her Uncle Dick.
The notion that Democrats have to moderate to govern, is, in effect, ceding half their leverage to a party not even interested in negotiating. And when you’ve already acknowledged this is an extraordinary time that requires extraordinary measures, it makes little sense to view moderation as something feasible, let alone necessary.
All have helped Ms. Klobuchar to be the most productive senator among the Democratic field in terms of bills passed with bipartisan support, according to a recent study for the Center for Effective Lawmaking. When she arrived in the Senate in 2007, Ms. Klobuchar was part of a bipartisan group of lawmakers that proposed comprehensive immigration reform, including a path to citizenship for 12 million undocumented immigrants, before conservative pundits made it political poison. Her more recent legislative accomplishments are narrower but meaningful to those affected, especially the legislation aimed at helping crime victims. This is not surprising given her background as the chief prosecutor in Minnesota’s most populous county. For example, one measure she wrote helped provide funds to reduce a nationwide backlog of rape kits for investigating sexual assaults.
Bipartisanship isn’t an unquestionable good; a policy doesn’t make people’s lives better just because both a Democrat and Republican voted for it. And given the partisan nature of Washington, it’s not even a marketable skill anymore. Those pundits who made bipartisan immigration reform are still around, and they hold more sway over the Republican Party than ever before. One of them is even President.
Reports of how Senator Klobuchar treats her staff give us pause. They raise serious questions about her ability to attract and hire talented people. Surrounding the president with a team of seasoned, reasoned leaders is critical to the success of an administration, not doing so is often the downfall of presidencies. Ms. Klobuchar has acknowledged she’s a tough boss and pledged to do better. (To be fair, Bill Clinton and Mr. Trump — not to mention former Vice President Biden — also have reputations for sometimes berating their staffs, and it is rarely mentioned as a political liability.)
This framing is appalling. The Times’ editorial board is using the paper’s own reporting into credible allegations of Klobuchar abusing her staff to victim blame the abused. It kind of scares me how many people had to have read this paragraph and signed off on it before it was published. “Rarely mentioned as a political liability?” That may be a fact, and voters may very well see it that way. But the opinion section of a newspaper — let alone the news section — has the right, if not the moral obligation, to say being a shitty boss is shitty.
And it’s far too early to count Ms. Klobuchar out — Senator John Kerry, the eventual Democratic nominee in 2004, was also polling in the single digits at this point in the race.
Kerry was at least at 15 percent in Iowa in at least one poll a month out, while Klobuchar is still in single digits with just over two weeks to go at the time of writing. If there is a rising wave of Amy Klobuchar support, we’d probably have seen the water leave the beaches by now.
Okay. So that’s who we should vote for. Now, what does the Times think of the state of our world?
THERE HAS BEEN A WILDFIRE BURNING in Australia larger than Switzerland. The Middle East is more unstable at this moment than at any other time in the past decade, with a nuclear arms race looking more when than if. Basket-case governments in several nations south of the Rio Grande have sent a historic flood of migrants to our southern border. Global technology companies exert more political influence than some national governments. White nationalists from Norway to New Zealand to El Paso use the internet to share ideas about racial superiority and which caliber of rifle works best for the next mass killing.
That “basket-case” line is a gross bit of xenophobia, given the United States itself is responsible for pretty much all of this political unrest.
The next president will shape the direction of America’s prosperity and the future of the planet, perhaps irrevocably. The current president, meanwhile, is a threat to democracy. He was impeached for strong-arming Ukraine into tampering with the 2020 election. There is no reason patriotic Americans should not be open to every chance to replace him at the ballot box.
Yet, Mr. Trump maintains near-universal approval from his party and will nearly certainly coast to the nomination. Democrats would be smart to recognize that Mr. Trump’s vision for America’s future is shared by many millions of Americans.
Any hope of restoring unity in the country will require modesty, a willingness to compromise and the support of the many demographics that make up the Democratic coalition — young and old, in red states and blue, black and brown and white. For Senator Klobuchar, that’s acknowledging the depth of the nation’s dysfunction. For Senator Warren, it’s understanding that the country is more diverse than her base.
There will be those dissatisfied that this page is not throwing its weight behind a single candidate, favoring centrists or progressives. But it’s a fight the party itself has been itching to have since Mrs. Clinton’s defeat in 2016, and one that should be played out in the public arena and in the privacy of the voting booth. That’s the very purpose of primaries, to test-market strategies and ideas that can galvanize and inspire the country.
So, if the President is a threat to democracy, and democracy is the very thing that keeps our country and way of life intact — the Times’s argument, not necessarily mine — then what is smart about appealing to his supporters? Aren’t they diametrically opposed to everything you stand for? How will you change their minds? Are you gonna tell them to compromise?
I mean, you could try. HIllary Clinton did in 2016, running a campaign centered around an appeal to our better angels. There’s that infamous Chuck Schumer quote from 2016: “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”
Now that we know how Pennsylvania and Ohio and Wisconsin voted that year, it’s fairly obvious that wasn’t a winning strategy. (I’m not sure why Schumer lumped Illinois in there, as it was never really in question.) And yet, it kind of was; Clinton won the popular vote, and the Democrats won back the House two years later. Does that mean everything is hunky-dory for them as a party? No, of course not; winning political power does not equate using it for good. They also face a massive structural disadvantage in the Senate and Electoral College, which goes to show that they’re working just as the Founding Fathers intended. But even a wishy-washy, center-to-right political party like the Democratic Party is more popular than the current Trumpian Republican Party. There is no silent majority. They’re very much a minority, and electorally speaking, you don’t need them to win. Describing our political landscape as something otherwise only serves to alienate and confuse your readership, as does endorsing two candidates for president.
Ms. Klobuchar and Ms. Warren right now are the Democrats best equipped to lead that debate.
May the best woman win.
May God help us all.
Politics and Prozac is a(n allegedly) biweekly newsletter about elections and their consequences. The author, Arya Hodjat, is a senior at the University of Maryland studying journalism and political science. You can reach him via email at aryahodjat11@gmail.com, or on Twitter @arya_kidding_me. Until next time, take care.