How Can Democrats Save the Party… From Their Own Leaders?

“It’s over.” “Biden’s numbers are in the ditch.” “Democrats are doomed.” “Call the priest.” These are Democrats talking! Even before November’s congressional elections are run, many conventional-thinking Democratic operatives are surrendering to a presumed Republican sweep. You don’t need a political science degree to know that if you start out announcing that you’ll lose, chances are you will – after all, who wants to vote for a party that shows no fighting spirit, no confidence in the appeal of its own ideas? What’s happening here is that the Party’s top leaders have decided their candidates can’t win in rural areas and smaller factory cities – so they’ve quit trying. Worse, they blame the voters, claiming that Trumpism, Fox News BS, and culture war nonsense have poisoned the minds of people “out there.” Thus, Party leaders have retreated from the countryside to focus entirely on big urban areas. Democratic Congressional leaders even killed their rural outreach programs, and the Party’s chairman in 2018 meekly declared: “You can’t door-knock in rural America.” Actually, sir, you can. And if you choose to abandon this whole working-class constituency – surprise! – it will abandon you. Worse, than failing to campaign along America’s dirt roads and factory streets, national Democrats have actively been pushing corporate policies that have ravaged families living there – including trade scams that sucking out union jobs; shamefully bailing out Wall Street bankers who crashed our real economy (while ignoring millions of devastated workaday people); and doing nothing about the corporate-caused farm depression still ripping across our land. Washington Democrats have largely betrayed this vital, FDRish constituency of millions that they now blithely dismiss as irredeemable. Did Party poohbahs think voters wouldn’t notice or care how they’re being treated? If we want them back on our side, then let’s go to them… and get back on their side!