Will the Democratic Party Stop Genocide and Champion Winning Domestic Issues in Time for November?
Image by Kamran Abdullayev.
With little more than four weeks to go before the November elections, polls show the Trump/Harris race as “too close to call.” Winning should be a breeze for Harris and the other Democratic candidates. The GOP’s Congressional votes and policies are bad for women, children, and workers. The GOP doesn’t recognize and act against climate violence, it protects the corporate-favorable tax code, it is soft on corporate crooks, it scuttles regulatory protections for the peoples’ health, safety, and economic wellbeing and mocks the dire necessity of preparedness for future pandemics. (The military Empire with its violent war crimes and runaway budget-busting drain on our domestic necessities is supported by both Parties and not in electoral contention.)
Why so close, then? Because for years, the Democratic Party has abandoned the blue collar, New Deal roots of the Roosevelt era and ferociously dialed for the same commercial dollars as does the GOP. It has hired corporate-conflicted political consulting firms that control campaign messages, strategies and has excluded access by citizen groups to candidates, generally preferring corporatism over democracy, regardless of its rhetoric.
It also doesn’t advance any path to electoral victory to abandon half the country – the red states – and surrender them to the Republicans. The mountain states and North and South Dakota used to have Democrats representing them in the Senate. Failing to compete in these low population states concedes about ten Senate seats at the outset.
Most telling in these last remaining days is the refusal for Kamala Harris and most Congressional candidates to have front and center proven and proper vote-getting agendas reflecting the New Deal.
To begin with I’m referring to raising the GOP frozen federal minimum wage to at least $15 an hour from its present $7.25. Democrats need more than a throwaway line on wages. They need to pour some of the billions of dollars raised into media and groundgame campaigns around the slogan “go vote for a raise, you’ve long earned and been denied by the Republicans.” That, authentically conveyed by thousands of Democratic candidates will get the attention of 25 million underpaid and struggling workers, who make our real economy run daily. Why aren’t the Dems ringing that bell?
Another winner for 65 million elderly voters is to pledge with full throttle to increase Social Security benefits frozen for half a century and to raise the Social Security tax on the wealthy to pay for it. Astonishingly, Kamala Harris and her handlers are not championing the “Social Security 2100 Act” which had 200 sponsors in the Congress, led by Congressman John Larson and Senator Richard Blumenthal. The throwaway line is that they “will protect social security” as it deficiently exists. Talk is not enough. The Democrats need to organize and communicate to drive this message.
Third, they should be championing government-paid child care, maternal and family sick leave and the child tax credit – all opposed by the Wall Street GOP. Paid for by raising taxes on the wealthy – this issue is an 85 percent poll winner. Instead, Harris and the Dems mumble with some general rhetoric that nobody really believes. Western countries have long had such social safety net protections for families and children.
Get-out-the-vote efforts are still inadequate. The Party has trouble listening to Rev. William Barber who argues that just a ten to fifteen percent increase in low-wage voter turnout from 2020 would win the November elections. Instead of scapegoating the Green Party and spending money to block Third Party ballot access, the Democrats should try harder to tap into the 80 to 90 million non-voters who stay home, many of whom don’t see anything benefiting them coming from bloviating, hypocritical politicians.
If readers want more ideas for ways to get more votes, such as midnight shift campaigning, and cracking down on corporate crooks, they can obtain my usable new book “Let’s Start the Revolution: Tools for Displacing the Corporate State and Building a Country that Works for the People” and go to winningamerica.net.
Are you wondering why Tim Walz didn’t do better against J.D. Vance in the VP debate? Vance managed to normalize criminal felon Trump with his serial lies and law violations, corruption, abuse of women, awful presidential record (recall his lethal mocking of the early Covid-19 pandemic), because Walz was muzzled by the Harris campaign operatives. He was told what not to speak about and to hew to the narrow Party line. That kind of advice may sink the genocidal Democratic Party with its insular cowardliness in November.
Will these observations get the attention of the tiny number of ruling Democratic Party operatives who make most of the major decisions for their rank and file? Probably not. But similar advice from loyal party columnists like Dana Milbank, Michelle Goldberg, Eugene Robinson, Charles Blow, E.J. Dionne, Paul Krugman, among others, may breach the upper deck’s aloofness.
The post Will the Democratic Party Stop Genocide and Champion Winning Domestic Issues in Time for November? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.