How the Dems Could Blow It Again

Born to lose

Comments (0) By Joe Donnelly Wednesday, Jan 30 2008

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Enter big mo' killer Al Gore. Not the been-to-the-desert-on-a-horse-with-no-name-and-I'm-back-to-save-the-world, Nobel Prize–winning Al Gore. Not the youthful, pre-Clinton Al Gore. No, we ran the wooden, disingenuous, say-anything, wear-cowboy-boots-if-I-have-to, turn-my-back-on-my-former-benefactor Al Gore. This was the Gore who seemed to have no clue who he was or what he stood for. The Al Gore who may have been the only Al Gore who could have lost that election, even if he kind of won it.

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The Dems had a golden opportunity to seize the White House from the poseur and liar in 2004, when much of the country was slowly starting to realize we'd been swindled. All it required was someone to grab that opportunity, to crystallize the moment, to have the audacity to call it like it was, to show people how badly they'd been had. But instead of that man, Howard Dean, we picked John Kerry, a guy who is so stiff he makes the 2000 Al Gore seem like a limbo dancer. It's hard to imagine Dean, of the wrestler's neck and bulging veins, sitting by helplessly getting Swift Boated. More likely, he would have body-slammed the fools who tried to Swift Boat him.

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All these missed opportunities have added up to years and years of public neglect of the state of our union. What were we thinking? Well, the answer is, we Dems don't think. We act emotionally, almost like children. We get swept up in things, like Ferraro's hair or Dukakis' Massachusetts Miracle, or whatever it was we liked about him.

And now, as I listen to Ted Kennedy in the background endorsing Barack Obama, talking about the new politics of hope and change and unity and about closing the door on the politics of fear and division, etc., I can feel it happening again. It's happening to me. The sweep of history is seductive. We're in a moment when a woman and an African-American are making real bids for the presidency of the United States, and you can bleat and protest all you want, but this moment, this momentum for Clinton and Obama, really is a lot about gender and race. And rightfully so. It's cool, man. It really is. I like it too. I want a woman and a black man as president, preferably a woman who is a black man. But then I realize that despite their power as metaphors, Clinton and Obama are politicians whose filthy-rich campaigns are stocked with money as dirty and loaded as any establishment politicians who have ever run. They walk in the door compromised.

And somewhere deep inside, I know this isn't about metaphors, or about unifying us (no one person can unify us). It isn't about empty Reaganesque catchwords like change and hope. No, as we head into a deep and structural recession brought on by the callousness, greed, incompetence and duplicity (permanent tax cuts and permanent war!) of the Bush years, I realize that this is about the same thing it was about when those steelworkers were jumping off bridges in my hometown — it's about economic terror and injustice in a land of winners and losers and very little in between. John Edwards really got this; did from the beginning. Too bad we didn't pick him.