Whig Out

Americans should wash their hands of the Democratic party. It's not because of what they've done, it's because of what they haven't done. They haven't delivered on important issues such as taxes and the public health insurance option. They mostly failed to stick up for their principles on the issues during the midterm elections. Those that did didn't receive enough support from the party. How else can you explain Joe Sestak losing the Senate race in Pennsylvania? And how can anyone explain wanting to throw outgoing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi under Michael Steele's bus when she accomplished more in two weeks than Harry Reid did in two years?

James Howard Kunstler, writing on his weekly blog, has compared Barack Obama to Millard Fillmore on many an occasion. Because like the thirteenth President of the United States, Obama has accomplished a good deal but has failed to deliver on the most crucial issues of the day and is too willing to compromise with the opposition. I'd like to add the following comparison - Obama, like Fillmore, may be the last U.S. President of his party, a party doomed to extinction.

A history lesson: In 1852, President Fillmore allowed his name to be placed in nomination by his party, the Whigs, for a presidential term in his own right. (Fillmore, also the twelfth U.S. Vice President, became President upon the death of his predecessor, Zachary Taylor.) But the debate over slavery, an issue neither the Whigs nor the Democrats could resolve, split the Whigs, and the party went for that old parlor trick that had worked for them before - they nominated a war hero, the only way they had ever won the White House. And so they nominated General Winfield Scott, a hero of the U.S.-Mexican War, a war most Whigs had, in fact, opposed. General Scott was soundly defeated by Democrat Franklin Pierce in the 1852 presidential election. When it became apparent that the Whigs couldn't even win with a war hero and had nothing else to unite them, they disintegrated.

See the parallels?

I have a feeling that in 2012, Obama will be challenged and defeated for the Democratic presidential nomination by a Southern moderate - because, heck, that's worked for the Democrats in the past! - who will in turn lose to a Republican. Without a sense of purpose or principle visible to the voter, Democrats will wither away and die as a party. Such changes happen in extremely contentious times, as the 1850s - the decade leading up to the Civil War - had been.

So here's what I propose to the liberal wing of the Democratic party. Mrs. Pelosi? Jerry Brown? Dick Blumenthal, Joe Sestak, Dick Durbin, the entire Congressional Black Caucus (except for those incoming Tea Partiers Tim Scott and Allen West, of course)? Leave the Democratic party! Form a new party! Coalesce with the Greens, MoveOn.org, any progressive group who shares your values! Call yourself the New Progressive party or something like that! Name Ed Schultz your party chairman! Let the remaining Democrats - the Lincoln Democrats, as in Blanche Lincoln, the corporate Democrats - go the way of the Whigs!

How do you think the Republican party got started? Northern Whigs, angered by their party's lack of commitment to ending or least containing slavery and promoting factory owners and free-soil farmers and industrialists, coalesced with the antislavery Free-Soil party and northern Democrats who despised their party's pro-Southern agenda, met in 1854 to form a new party devoted to their own socioeconomic interests, which included support for tariffs, improved infrastructure, and industrial manufacturing as well as stopping the spread of slavery. That party was the Republican party. It was formed in recognition of the fact that the Whigs were through. The Democrats are through today. It's time to start over and form a new liberal party to offer a choice against, not an echo of, the Grand Old Party - a party that will stand up for workers, the middle class, women, and racial and ethnic populations.

You lost the House, you're going to lose the Senate in 2012, you lost numerous governorships, and you're unlikely to get back any of that later in the decade. When you have nothing, you have nothing to lose. Think it over. Let me know what you decide. I'll probably be taking a nap.