On this, the highly momentous first anniversary of the best blog on the net, Recovering Liberal, I am following up what I had to say a few days ago. Back then, you might recall, I titled my column, Liberal Is Not A Dirty Word. The basic idea of the column was that if we as Democrats are to ever take back the country and return it to sanity; we had to start doing what Democrats do. That is, we have to start being Democrats again.
Why then, you may ask, am I now saying that we have to stop being Democrats? Ah, therein, dear readers, lies the rub. We have, over the last years, become suicidal in the way we run our party. We have had no discipline, and that has caused it to become nearly impossible to win elections.
Discipline in a party is as simple as controlling the number of people running for a single position.
In the presidential election of 2004, it seemed that anyone with any credentials as a Democrat (or in the case of Gen. Wesley Clark, no credentials as a Democrat) could declare themselves a candidate for the Presidency and be taken seriously. The problem in doing that is that by the time we get past the primaries, the public has grown tired of our intra-party squabbling. When public perception turns against you, you lose elections. After all was said and done, and with all of the Bush cheating set aside, John Kerry was unable to ever gain the traction that he needed to beat a President who had done everything in his power to not be reelected. The economy was failing, we were taken into a war under false pretenses, and there was rampant government thievery going on. Bush should have lost by a landslide. Instead, he won by a hair. Even if the President’s people had played it honestly, Kerry would have only taken the election by one state. Simply put, the divisiveness cost us the election as much as any other factor.
The problem is that we run our party in that manner right down to local politics.
Here in New York, we are in a mayoral election year. Mike Bloomberg, the incumbent Republican mayor, is well liked and has more money than G-d. He is not taking any public financing, and, therefore, he can spend his billions any way he pleases. In the best of circumstances, it would be tough to beat this guy with a solid candidate. So what are the Democrats doing? They’re running four candidates in a primary, and none of those candidates will emerge from the primary with enough support to beat Bloomberg. They won’t, because the campaign has been so nasty that the winner will probably cede the rest of the Democratic votes to Bloomberg.
We can’t even seem to get it together in the simplest of races. The office of Manhattan Borough President has a Democratic primary with believe it or not 12 candidates. There is no run off in this race, which means that, in theory, the winner can receive as little as 9% of the vote. Right from the start, it was apparent that only 3 of the contenders even had a chance to win, yet the others kept hanging in. One of those 3 is now out of contention because of disclosures that she has had some strange dealings with the Church of Scientology. Fortunately for the winner of this race, there is no meaningful Republican running for this office. The person who takes this primary will be the next Borough President, but the party will have emerged from the combat bloodied.
In the race for Public Advocate, the situation is worse. Three challengers to the sitting Public Advocate, Betsy Gottbaum, are seeking to unseat her, and they are all Democrats. Two of these people are people who have never run for public office before. Gimme a break!
Once upon a time, there were guys in New York like Carmine De Sapio and Mead Esposito. They were Democratic Party bosses.  Like the Republican bosses in Washington, they were not to be crossed. If they didn’t want people to run in a specific election, they sat back and waited their turn, or they would be blackballed from ever running again. Cross the boss, and you get slapped upside your head. Cooperate, and eventually, you will get the nomination in an election you can win.
These guys knew how to win elections, and this is something many Democrats seem to have forgotten.
If the freedom to disrupt the bigger causes of the Democratic party in favor of 15 minutes of fame is what the Democratic Party has become, then we need to stop being Democrats and return to a political discipline that will win elections.
We need to do this for the party.
We need to do this for the country. Or we may not have a party.
Which means, that we may not recognize the country that will be left if these guys continue to whup our sorry butts in election after election.
Is anybody listening out there?
Dr. Dean, can you hear me?
- henryhonig
