Editorials

Let’s start off with Paul Krugman’s summary of the inauguration, tweeted this morning:

“Takeover by a popular vote loser who squeaked through thanks to foreign intervention and blatant malpractice by the FBI. The system worked!”

That said, what can be done? Is there a way the system can be made to work better?

This week I was lucky enough to join a small group of supporters of newly re-elected Congressmember Ami Bera for a bit of “where do we go from here” discussion. He’s from the Sacramento area, from one of the state’s few potential swing districts. He noted wryly that it was not like ours, which has been represented for many years now by the indomitable and unbeatable Barbara Lee.

He told us he hoped someday to be in a race that was decided on election night, instead of having to suffer through weeks of tortuous counting before being declared the winner. He’s been in three races for this seat now—he lost the first one, won the second one after the district boundaries were redrawn, and this last time he actually tripled his victory margin, he said triumphantly: from about 2,000 votes to about 6,000. This is still mighty close.

In the last few weeks, my friends around the country report that they’ve been in standing-room-only meetings of their local progressive interest groups, packed with people who hope to figure out how we’re going to survive the “President” Drumpf regime. Pundits and public intellectuals of all stripes, including some erstwhile conservatives, have been wondering the same thing online and in print. 

There seems to be general agreement that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee didn’t really cut the mustard in the fall race. What the insider wannabes call the ground game was notably lacking in the Midwestern states which had been expected to go for Clinton. My experience in Akron, Ohio, confirmed that analysis. 

A friend and I did what insiders call parachuting in, summoned at the last minute by a friend who used to live in Berkeley. She’s a savvy older African-American woman who’s put together a strong coterie of her peers, women of a certain age who have done a great job of getting voters registered in their own community. She held down the reception desk in the Akron’s storefront Democratic election headquarters and dispatched workers as needed to drive voters to the polls. The part of the operation that she commanded went like clockwork, but other activities were not so smooth. 

The local Democratic party had feared some last minute attempt at voter suppression on election day, which didn’t materialize. But someone, somewhere, had called in a phalanx of lawyers just in case. My ex-Berkeley friend knew that I was an inactive member of the California Bar, so she thought I might have something to add, but frankly my colleagues way outclassed me in the legal department.  

One night before the election I was in a meeting in a room packed to the gills with obviously high-powered out-of-town legal talent. Ironically, Dan Roth, the guy who chaired, had flown in from the Bay Area himself, where he now lives, though Akron is his family home and he said he went there to work on every election. 

He delivered bad news: the local honchos had ruled that only attorneys licensed in Ohio could monitor the vote count, so there turned out not to be much for us to do. But we agreed that simply the presence of so many lawyers had kept the funny stuff out of the early voting picture. 

Luckily, since I’m pretty old, I’ve had a good bit of experience in election pavement pounding, going back several decades, so I happily did that instead. My assigned canvassing partner was a woman in her fifties who had both a Yale law degree and an MBA, but was marooned in Akron because of her executive husband’s job with a tire company.  

On a lovely autumn afternoon, we dutifully walked a nice middle-class mostly African-American neighborhood, where we discovered that almost everyone had already voted with early ballots, despite the long lines at the single polling place open early. Everyone was friendly, no problem there for Hillary. And on election day, I observed at a neighborhood polling place, where nothing untoward occurred. 

So what did happen to Ohio? Not to mention Michigan, which was reliable Democratic territory when I managed a Congressional primary campaign there five decades ago. Or Wisconsin, which in its time has elected more than one progressive hero to national office.  

I did talk to a young Black man driving a shuttle cart at the Cleveland airport who told me he wasn’t planning to vote, even though he was registered. Why was that? 

He didn’t think it would do much good: “They’re both crooks, anyway. What about those speeches she made to the bankers? What did she tell those rich guys, for all that money? And what was on that computer that the FBI was looking at last week, tell me that!” 

The Donald-and/or-Bernie fake news troll-arama—yes, both have some crazies in their fan base—seems to have connected online with just enough of the voters with a plausible enough rap to tip the scales in states like Ohio, so that the electoral college counted more than the national popular vote.  

Where do we go from here? President Obama suggested that we might actually get out and talk to some of our fellow citizens, and he’s right on the mark, I think. 

This came up in the discussion with Representative Bera, and he said he’s working with a group led by Vice-President Biden to plan how to do just that. They’re trying to figure how to start now to get the right boots on the ground and the best faces at voters’ front doors to win in swing districts for Congress in 2018. 

However making sure that our troops speak the local language is important. All too often, big D Democrats who see the state, the country or even the world as their playground don’t understand local issues, and make big gaffs when they show up in town. 

Right now, for example, there’s a struggle between some Sacramento functionaries led by Jerry Brown and Bay Area locals over how much control residents should have over hometown zoning. Here in Berkeley the very same people who backed Bernie Sanders were elected to the city council largely because of their opposition to big market-rate apartment development, yet at the same time Governor Brown has been covertly pushing a whole flock of changes to state law to drastically reduce local autonomy in favor of corporate developers. Opposition to unwanted development is the one issue which can bring together the “left” and the “right” in California and elsewhere. 

Example: Robert Reich, a national Big D Dem who did go for Bernie, endorsed the losing mayoral candidate in the November Berkeley city election, the pro-developer guy who got $100,000 from the national realtors’ PAC. Reich stiffed the eventual winner, the one Bernie himself endorsed. He just doesn’t get Berkeley, even though he’s lived here at least part-time for several years now.  

Another example: The real estate firm of Democratic Senator Diane Feinstein’s husband Richard Blum is behind the attempt to sell off Berkeley’s Post Office, roundly opposed by all kinds of Berkeleyans. But nevertheless, what can we do about the nation? 

The most straightforward simple fix would be to elect a better House of Representatives in 2018. All Democrats are not alike, but they’re still better than the alternative.  

Here’s one practical suggestion: I called Dan Roth to check my memories of the Akron campaign, and he told me about a new campaign he’d just discovered. Swingleft.org is an attempt to match volunteers from reliably Blue congressional districts with the closest swing districts, based on zip code. I typed in 94705, and was connected with District-10, around Modesto, where our help might pay off. 

But if we go to other districts, we have to be less than dogmatic about our Berkeley values. In Ami Bera’s district for example, the conventional left—and right—opposition to international trade deals like TPP must be carefully nuanced because a lot of his constituents grow and export rice across the Pacific, and they liked what they heard about TPP.  

We need to get out and talk to our fellow citizens, for sure, but also, we need to listen to them. There are more issues that unite us than the ones that divide us, for example health care and racial equality. Can we focus on those, for a couple of years at least? Let's try.