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.     

Democrats By the Numbers

Number of U.S. House seats the Democrats have in the 115th Congress: 194 (out of 435)

Number of U.S. Senate seats the Democrats have in the 115th Congress:  48, including 2 independents (out of 100) 

Number of Senate seats Democrats could have in the 116th Congress: 40

Number of filibusters they could have after 2018 with that number of Senators: 0

Number of Democratic governorships: 15

Number of Democratic-majority state legislative houses: 31 (out of 99)

Number of state legislative seats Democrats have lost since 2008: about 900

Number of states in which the Democrats have the governor's office and both houses of the legislature: 6

Number of presidential possibilities for 2020: 0 

The last time a party was in such dire straits: 1852

Number of years that party in dire straits - the Whig Party - lasted after then: 4

Imagining former Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz in a bar in Miami Beach getting plastered: priceless

There are some things money can't buy.  For everything else, there's Citizens United.  

Book Review: "The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party" by Michael F. Holt

The short history of the Whig Party in the United States is usually presented as thus: A party is formed in the 1830s to oppose President Andrew Jackson, his Democratic Party, and their policies, but the new party's members have little to unite them other than their opposition to Jackson.  Ironically, their only success in winning the Presidency is to run two old soldiers who remind the voters of Jackson, and when a third old soldier can't defeat an appalling Democratic presidential prospect such as Franklin Pierce, the party, already divided over slavery, rolls over and dies.

Michael Holt's 1999 book "The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party" brilliantly makes it clear, over the course of a thousand pages, that nothing could be farther from the truth.  Holt uses numerous historical sources and exhaustively studies voter turnout in the states that made up the Union between 1834 and 1856 to show how the Whig Party was more than just reflexive opposition to the Democrats.  Holt presents the party, founded largely by Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, as a cohesive political organization intensely devoted to preserving republican self-government and economic vitality and opposing the Democrats' disdain for active government while advocating for a system that provided opportunity to all Americans rather than let the economy sort itself out.  Holt presents a fascinating story of principled Whig politicians in both the North and the South who strove for a strong Union and fought to balance sectional interests to keep the country together.  

Holt doesn't necessarily say that the slavery question could have been settled once and for all without a civil war, but he credits the Whigs for their efforts to avoid such a conflict.  He seems myopic, though, by suggesting that the Whigs might have prevented a war as bad as the one that actually transpired.  Historians have argued whether the United States was destined for Armageddon, as Michael Harwood once put it, in settling the slavery issue, but Holt doesn't seem to probe this question far enough.

The book's most obvious fault - an overemphasis on the inner workings of politics - is also, perversely, one of its biggest strengths.  Holt shows how differently American politics operated in the antebellum years, and the reader comes to understand how the Whigs prospered before they eventually withered.  Their basic program - low tariffs, a national bank, improved infrastructure - sustained them early on.  But Holt demonstrates how numerous issues - the war with Mexico, the struggle to craft the Compromise of 1850 that tried to handle slavery expansion territories ceded by the Mexicans, the undermining of the bonds between northern and southern Whigs over the Kansas-Nebraska Act - caused disagreements within the party.  The party's leading figures - Clay, Daniel Webster,  John Quincy Adams, Thomas Ewing, William Seward - are large players here, of course, but the roles of lesser-known Whigs like Robert Toombs, Truman Smith, and John Bell are also highlighted here.  And the party's two last Presidents - Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore - are reassessed as major figures of their day in their efforts to govern the nation and preserve the Union.  

Holt also describes the efforts at new Union parties and a new party around President Taylor in great detail, with  a dissection of how factors in addition to slavery - the growing irrelevance of old issues such as banking and tariffs, patronage, disputes between conservatives and moderates in state Whig organizations, the divisions caused by the rise of the anti-immigrant Know-Nothing movement - divided the party and set it on a course for extinction.  Despite the academic, dry prose of Holt's text, the central argument of why the Whig Party died - it became too out of step and too slow to realize changes in the American body politic - becomes clearer with each passing chapter.  With the two-party system in America at a greater risk of collapsing than at any time since the 1850s, this book is required reading for anyone who might want to save the dying parties . . . or figure out how to start a new one.    

Why Some Liberals Want Trump To Win the White House

Seriously.

No, really.

Many liberals disappointed and disgusted with Hillary Clinton have come to the conclusion that Hillary won't be favorable to progressive values should she win the Presidency, and the leaked speech excerpts provided by WikiLeaks showing the Democratic nominee committed to largely preserving the status quo bear more than enough evidence to support their prediction.   In fact, some liberals view a Donald Trump Presidency  as a necessary evil to set the stage for a progressive comeback in 2020.  A Hillary Presidency, they argue, wouldn't improve the progressive movement's lot - indeed, they say, it could only make it worse.

Here's how their theory goes.  If Hillary wins, she will not only face a Republican House of Representatives but possibly a Republican Senate, elected by voters wary of Democratic congressional power under a Democratic President, and she will get little if anything done.  Worse still, there could very well be a recession within the next four years, which liberals believe will happen regardless of who wins the White House in 2016.  The Democrats would then go into the 2018 state and congressional midterm elections at a huge disadvantage - particularly in the Senate elections, as they will have far more seats the defend than the Republicans, and the party that controls  the Presidency almost always loses congressional seats in the midterms.  Thus, the Democrats would lose big time in 2018, which would lead to a Republican blowout in 2020 when the Presidency will be up for grabs along with Congress . . . and 2020 is a census year.  In this scenario, the Republicans would gain the power to gerrymander the House for another decade.       

If Trump is elected President, though, the Senate will likely go Democratic, because voters want to keep a check on Trump, and he won't be able to accomplish much in that event.  He will, though, try to pursue orthodox Republican policies and push some elements of his own extreme agenda.  This, in turn, could embolden the progressive opposition to make significant gains in the 2018 midterm congressional elections and set the stage for a progressive comeback across the board in 2020.  The Republicans would then likely be voted out of office in favor of the opposition, which would then gain control of House redistricting.  Whether that opposition is the Democratic Party or a new liberal party that ends up replacing the Democrats still unclear, but Whig-like Democratic disintegration is a distinct possibility in the event of a Trump victory.  But the Republicans would have an impossible time trying to govern going forward; it could be the end of their own party, in fact.

Or, to put it another way - the way I've been putting it - a Trump victory would mean the end of the Democratic Party, and a Trump Presidency would mean the end of the Republican Party.  Everyone's a winner! :-D

The problem, though, is that the progressive comeback liberals envision is based on two things  - a Trump victory and a Democratic takeover of the Senate - that now seem unlikely to happen and a third thing - a recession within four years - that no one can predict will or won't happen with anything resembling certainty.  Also, Trump is so dumb and dangerous, it may to too risky to allow him to win with the hope that his Presidency can galvanize the left.  The idea that America could even survive a Trump Presidency may be the least likely outcome of all. 

The Hillary scenario, though, is very likely to play out as these liberals see it, and in the event of her election, liberals will have to face a choice. They should either take over the Democratic Party and return it to its New Deal/Great Society values or just jump ship and form a new party to take the place of the Democrats over time, just as the Labour Party took over the place of the Liberal Party in Britain.  Personally, I prefer the latter option.  Because the Democrats are going to deteriorate faster the the old British Liberal Party did.  The fall of the Democratic Party is inevitable, given its electoral troubles of late; Hillary's election will only delay the party's richly deserved death by four years.

Any Democrat, meanwhile, who finds a silver lining in a hypothetical Trump victory by having a well-defined enemy to run against should, as always, remember this.  The Whigs, voted out of power in 1852, thought that Democratic President Franklin Pierce would provide them the incentive to come back in 1854 and 1856 by stumbling in office.  Pierce did indeed stumble, but it was the anti-immigrant Know-Nothings and the antislavery Republicans who benefited from his troubles, the Whigs having collapsed for want of a message or a purpose.  Today's Democrats have neither as well.

Oh yeah, last night's debate . . . it would be inappropriate for me to comment on it. :-O

Looking More Whiggish . . .

James Howard Kunstler's comparisons of Barack Obama to Millard Fillmore, as a President running a country on the verge of imploding with no idea of how to deal with it outside the realm of petty politics, is suddenly more apt thanks to dissension from the progressive base of the Democratic party. Outgoing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid are taking a stand against Republican demands for the Bush tax cuts to be extended to everyone, insisting instead that the Republicans vote on a proposal that would extend the Bush tax cuts to the middle class only. And they're doing it whether the White House backs them or not. George Soros, the philanthropist and Democratic party donor, was recently quoted as saying that if Obama can't deliver for the left, then Democrats should look for someone else.

Which is how the Whig party destroyed itself. I earlier noted that the Whigs nominated Winfield Scott, a war hero, to run for President in 1852 because war heroes had helped the party win earlier presidential elections. But there's more to it than that. William H. Seward, an antislavery Whig senator from New York, pushed for a nominee more sympathetic to the party's antislavery wing. (President Fillmore had supported the Compromise of 1850, which allowed slavery to extend into the territories won from the war with Mexico, and he did not believe the federal government had the right to restrict slavery despite his own personal hatred for it.) General Scott was nominated because he was a Southerner with pro-Northern, antislavery sympathies, but a plank in the party platform accepting the Compromise of 1850 undermined Scott's support in the North as easily as antislavery sentiments hurt him among his fellow Southerners. In a latter-day scenario in our own time, Obama could face a challenge from the left in 2012 and lose the Democratic presidential nomination to a candidate without enough party support and lose to an orthodox, activist Republican like . . . Sarah Palin. Franklin Pierce, the man who defeated Winfield Scott for the Presidency in 1852, was nominated for the Presidency for being an orthodox, activist Democrat.

The Republican party of today, however, is much like the Democratic party in 1852 in this respect; it's only stronger by default, as it's ridden with factions of its own and declining rapidly. Michael Moore has even suggested that we could soon face a two Democratic party presidential candidates, a Republican nominee, and a Tea Party candidate, just as there had been a four-way race in 1860. I'm not predicting a repeat of history to the letter, but I am predicting that one of the major parties will disappear and the other will fall into a comatose state when a party that hasn't been formed yet fills the vacuum. The socioeconomic dislocation in the decade that led up to the Civil War made this happen before, and the aftermath was a period of national Armageddon - a conflict joined by disunion. Before 2020, there could be a similar conflagration brought on by decades of predatory capitalism, an angry, deprived middle class, and the ineffectiveness of either party to avert such a conflict. And one side will be disabled long enough to let the other rewrite the laws of the land.

I predict that the Democratic party will fall because they don't know what they stand for and they've been around too long. A new people's party will replace it out of the many parties that form in its dissolution, just as the Republican party was one of the many political organizations aiming to fill the void left by the Whigs. Today's more liberal Democrats - for example, Alan Grayson, just voted out of his House seat in Florida - will either belong to this next major party or belong to a party that doesn't work out, like the Know-Nothings of the 1850s. A Democratic senator elected in 2010 will belong to another party by the time he or she stands for re-election in 2016, just as William Seward began his second Senate term as a Whig and ended it as a Republican. And, like the party that ultimately represents it in the future, the American middle class - if it's to survive at all - will assume a form we do not yet recognize.

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.