Barack Obama? Is That You?

Have you ever wondered what happened to Barack Obama? Well, the forty-fourth President of the United States is back.

The former President, who turned 57 this past Saturday, announced that he and his wife Michelle are endorsing 81 Democratic candidates for congressional, gubernatorial and state legislative elections, with more endorsements to come.  It's part of Obama's efforts to help the Democrats regain power nationwide.  Two of those candidates are in my home state of New Jersey - Andy Kim (no, not that guy who sang "Rock Me Gently" in the seventies) for the state's Third U.S. House District and Tom Malinowski for its Seventh U.S. House District.  No endorsement for Mikie Sherrill in my district, the Eleventh, just yet.

So why is Obama doing all this?  Because he says that, in the past decade, the Democrats lost far too many elective offices, including governorships and control of federal and state legislatures, to the Republicans, and they have to start winning these offices back if they have any chance of surviving going forward.

Hmm . . . it's too bad Obama was never in a position to do anything about this before!

And what Obama has said sounds suspiciously like what another Democrat who had hoped to succeed him as President has been saying for about nine months now. This other Democrat has been doing something about it for those nine months and counting  - and he's already done more than what Obama did for his party in eight years!

And here he is!            

Martin O'Malley has been toiling in obscurity - obscurity created by a media establishment that doesn't give a twit about him - helping Democrats win state and local elections (mostly special elections) through his Win Back Your State PAC.  The fanfare he has failed to get will likely be compensated by the numerous endorsements from the state and local Democratic officials he helps get elected this year and next should he run for President in 2020.  Obama isn't doing anything now that O'Malley hasn't already done.

O'Malley was always charitable toward President Obama (who apparently wants former Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick to run for President in 2020) during Obama's two terms, saying that he couldn't solve every problem in America because he was merely the President, not a magician.  But Obama was a magician - he made the Democratic Party disappear!  And party chairs Tim Kaine and Debbie Wasserman Schultz were his apprentices.   

I'm glad Obama is helping people like O'Malley rebuild the Democratic Party.  But with Donald Trump having reversed every policy initiative Obama instigated, the sad truth is that Obama's legacy is a smaller Democratic Party with a thousand fewer elective offices - death by a thousand cuts.  Before 2017, no President had left office with his party in such a sorry state since Millard Fillmore left office in 1853.

Millard Fillmore, of course, was the last Whig President.     

Can't Find a Better Slogan

I mean, have you seen these guys?

The Democratic Party, having tried out different taglines for the upcoming 2018 midterm elections, finally thinks it has a winning slogan, and, tellingly, it's not one of the slogans the party offered its members to vote on earlier this month.   It's better than those four would-be slogans, so it's appropriate that it uses the word "better" four times.  Here it is: 

"A Better Deal: Better Skills, Better Jobs, Better Wages"

So okay, it has a subtle reference to Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, and the message, as Bill Clinton might have said, focuses on the economy like a laser beam.  So far, so good - or, so better.  Well, what's not to like?

Quite a few things, actually.  For one thing, the slogan doesn't tell us how Democrats are going to provide a better job market.  Doing something about income inequality would be nice, but the Democrats can't say anything that would offend their Wall Street backers, even though they've lost most of them to Donald Trump.  Second, it doesn't tell us what kind of superior jobs the Democrats want to provide.  Maybe jobs building and running a modern national passenger railroad?  Maybe bringing manufacturing jobs back from China?  Who knows?  Thirdly, it doesn't say how they plan to provide the skills; maybe bring Gary Hart's "Strategic Investments" policy proposal from the eighties out of cold storage?  More likely, they expect you to figure out how to get the skills, which sounds like a Republican proposal.  Fourth, the slogan only mentions economic issues and doesn't say diddly-squat about quality-of-life issues - nothing about schools, no mention of climate change, and no stand on gun control.  And oh yeah, no mention of the issue that the Republicans have forced us to face - the fate of the health care system.

But the last and most damning flaw of this slogan is its comparative-degree language.  The slogan doesn't say that the Democrats can provide a superb or an excellent economic program, or even a good one - only a better one.  Better than what?  The Republican economic program?  Well, yes, the Democratic economic program is better, I guess.  Providing hundreds of thousands of dead-end jobs is better than providing tens of thousands of dead-end jobs.  A modest tax increase on the wealthy is better than a tax cut for the wealthy.

And Cleopatra was a better movie than Heaven's Gate.

The simple truth is that while Republicans haven't exactly set the bar very high, neither have the Democrats.  Both the Clinton and Obama administrations improved the economy, but many people were still left out, and the fact that the Republicans controlled the House of Representatives for six of the eight years of each of Clinton's and Obama's two terms in office only goes so far to excuse both men. Clinton was instrumental in repealing the Glass-Steagall Act separating investment and commercial banking, and Obama did nothing to prosecute the bankers who took advantage of the law's repeal and caused the Wall Street financial crisis of 2008.  Simply being better isn't enough.  This slogan was supposed to have been worked out with a Bernie Sanders supporter, but it sounds a lot like the banter of then-Virginia governor and now U.S. Senator (and 2016 Democratic vice presidential nominee)  Tim Kaine, below, in his official Democratic response to President George Walker Bush's 2006 State of the Union address.      

Every other sentence of Kaine's remarks seemed to be, "But there's a better way."  Jon Stewart, then the host of "The Daily Show," quite smartly mocked him for never explicitly saying what the better way was. Jay Willis of Gentleman's Quarterly, meanwhile, summed up the problem with the new Democratic tagline better than I ever could:  

"Voters want better skills, and better jobs, and better wages. (And better health care, and a stronger social safety net, and a fairer tax system, and so on and so forth.) But the party desperately needs to decide which policies it plans to support in order [to] effectuate these outcomes, even if some of the more tantalizing possibilities - single-payer health care or a federal minimum wage hike or whatever - are more aspirational at this particular moment in history than anything else."

Incidentally, this new slogan from the Democrats led many folks to compare it (unfavorably) with a similar slogan from Papa John's Pizza:  "Better Ingredients, Better Pizza."  Which is ironic, since Papa John's founder John Schnatter built his empire on paying his employees low wages and used his millions to build himself a mansion in California so colossal that even William Randolph Hearst would have scoffed at its opulence.  The slogan recalled for me the use of comparative-degree words in those old Napier costume jewelry ads, as the Democrats' promises are just as authentic and as serious as costume jewelry.  But at least the comparative-degree adjectives in those old Napier ads had a purpose - to ensure the correct pronunciation of the brand name.

And at least those Napier ads featured hot models like Kelly Emberg (above) and Jane Hitchcock. 

 All the Democrats have to offer are Charles Schumer and Tom Perez.

And they're not exactly GQ material.

The voters are not stupid.  They know that there's something better.  But they don't see anything out there that's good. 

And if the Democrats need another slogan in the near future, perhaps they can consider this one . . . 

Rotting From Within

Okay, Hillary Clinton is running ahead of Donald Trump in most polls, and those of us who believe the Clintons have outstayed their welcome likely won't be able to stop their desired restoration.  But just remember this; even if  Hillary does win in November, that is not going to fix the problems of the Democratic Party!  The Democrats will still have a minority of governorships and state legislative chambers, they'll still be a minority in the House, and they may not even win the Senate this year if enough voters decide that Hillary, if elected President, is too untrustworthy to be given a Democratic majority in either house of Congress.  And whoever becomes the permanent chair of the Democratic National Committee in 2017 will have his or her work cut out for him or her by having to undo the work of his or her two predecessors, Tim Kaine (who lost the House and several governorships to the Republicans in the 2010 midterms) and Debbie Wasserman Schultz (who lost the Senate to the Republicans in the 2014 midterms).  Kaine is the Democratic vice presidential nominee; Wasserman Schultz is a Hillary stooge who has assumed an honorary leadership position in the Clinton campaign and was just renominated to run for another U.S. House term in her district over an opponent who supported Bernie Sanders.  Not good.

The problem remains an inability to cultivate plausible candidates for down-ballot offices.  One example of this is Kentucky, where, after Democrats abandoned their fifty-state strategy, Democratic "rising stars" were handily defeated and humbled into irrelevance.  Jack Conway famously lost his U.S. Senate bid to Rand Paul in 2010 but was tagged by a Chris Matthews as a Democrat to watch.  After Conway's loss in Kentucky gubernatorial election of 2015, Democrats stopped watching; he withdrew from politics and returned to private law practice after having served as the state's attorney general.  And no one wants to talk about the future of Allison Lundergan Grimes, who challenged Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell for his seat in 2014 only for McConnell to emerge as the winner and still champ . . . and Majority Leader.  Now that Rand Paul is facing what should be an easy re-election victory over a different opponent (I could look up his name again, but it's not important), we don't hear much about Democratic prospects in Republican states or a fifty-state strategy.  Republican prospects in Democratic states?  Don't count out Scott Walker for a third term as governor of Wisconsin in 2018.

Former Maryland governor Martin O'Malley, once a Democratic rising star himself but long since laughed out of the limelight when he tried to run for President, has long complained about Democratic inattention to down-ballot races and has been touted as a possible Democratic National Committee chairman.  However, neither the committee itself nor the Clintons themselves have taken such a proposal seriously, which is why no one else does.  O'Malley loves the Democratic Party and wants to save it, but the same people who doomed his political career to irrelevance have already doomed the party to the same. They let it rot from within, and while the party's prospects look good on the surface, its collapse is only one presidential election defeat away, whether it be in 2016 or 2020.  Perhaps concerned Democrats like O'Malley should stop worrying about what's best for the party and start thinking about what's best for the country . . . and form a new party.