Jay Inslee has, alas, ended his campaign. Of all the white dudes running for the presidency next year, he seemed like he had the most coherent reason for running: he correctly recognises climate change as the existential threat that it is, and he has a lot of specific policy knowledge that would be useful in combating it. So, of course, he never stood a snowball’s chance in hell.
He wasn’t really running for president, though; he was running for the head of the EPA, or the Department of Energy, or the Department of the Interior, or maybe some newfangled climate czar position that could be created in a Democratic administration to manage climate-related aspects of all of those departments and more.
At least one other candidate gets it, though:
I’ve been saying for a while that Warren and Harris have lapped the field in my estimation, which is still true, but I feel like Warren is almost two laps ahead of the third place candidate (whoever that is – changes depending on my mood) and one lap ahead of Harris by this point. (Ask me again after the next debate and I may still change my mind, though!)
Meanwhile, over at Balloon Juice, Adam Silverman
makes the case for a mixture of idealism and realism being necessary both to win a campaign and to enact one’s political agenda. The whole thing is not very long and worth reading in full, but here is a lengthy excerpt, with my own emphasis added to the points I consider most important:
Quote:
Idealism is important. It motivates people. It provides purpose. It is inspiring. It is necessary, but it is not sufficient to win.
As I’ve written about here before, the 2020 campaign is, essentially, occurring at the same time as a largely non-violent, non-lethal, and non-kinetic domestic rebellion and insurgency against the late 19th and almost all of the 20th centuries, as well as the ever more diverse emerging American demographic majority. Though the spikes in violence and lethality have increased recently and I expect they’ll continue to do so. As such, realism is both necessary and sufficient to temper the idealism.
In order to win in 2020, Democrats must fight to win on the terrain that actually exists. And that terrain includes large donations being legal. While we might all agree that in an ideal America, large donations, large corporate donors, dark money networks, and a whole host of other campaign financing that is currently legal would be replaced with something that doesn’t just equate the ability to spend money with protected speech under the 1st Amendment. But that is not the America we currently live in. Nor is it the America in which the 2020 elections will be taking place. If you want to change the system to more closely resemble your ideal campaign finance and election system, you must first mount a successful, winning campaign within the system we currently have. This is simply recognizing reality. And candidates failing to avail themselves of all legal means to win are not dealing with reality. They are also making it harder for themselves to actually win. Part of securing the peace after winning is remaking the system so it is closer to the ideal one you want. The battlefields of the 2020 campaign and election exist in reality as it is, not in the ideal future we would like to get to. For the Democrats, winning in 2020 means that they must win the Electoral College regardless of the popular vote outcome, retake the majority in the Senate, hold the majority in the House, hold all the state houses and legislatures that Democrats currently have, and flip as many as possible of those they don’t before the next round of redistricting. Anything and everything else is a waste of resources. Nothing anyone wants done on any issue from campaign finance reform to healthcare reform, from the most moderate to the most progressive and idealistic approach to any domestic or foreign policy concern will occur if these battles aren’t won.
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Naturally, I agree. I still have a firm vision for how I would like the world to look (i.e., idealism), but I’ve become increasingly convinced that pragmatism or realism – the ability to deal with the world as it exists rather than as I wish it existed – is a necessary step towards getting any of those political ideals made real. This may mean allying ourselves temporarily with people we don’t like or even particularly trust if it’s necessary to overcome fascism. It may mean working on the inside of a system that we wish didn’t even exist, either so we can influence it to be less malevolent or so we can take advantage of its resources to direct them against the system’s malefactors. It may, as Adam says, mean politicians have to take money from people they don’t particularly care for – this isn’t a typical election, and desperate measures are called for to remove the occupant of the White House. And so on.
Politicians are frequently judged on the basis of their donors. On this subject, I keep being pulled back to this quote from Jesse Unruh, California State Treasurer from 1975-1987: “If you can’t eat their food, drink their booze, screw their women, take their money, and then vote against them, you’ve got no business being up here.”
Unruh is a fascinating figure. Biographer Bill Boyarsky, according to
San Francisco Chronicle reporter Charles Matthews (again, emphasis mine),
Quote:
makes the case that, for a quarter of a century, Unruh played a central role in shaping the California that emerged as the nation’s setter of trends, both culturally and politically. Putting it simply, Unruh got his hands on the money, and while some of it may have lined his pockets, he also used it to promote a progressive agenda that transformed California, not only through direct accomplishments in such areas as civil rights and improvements in the state’s education system and infrastructure, but also through provoking the conservative backlash represented by such figures as Ronald Reagan and Howard Jarvis.
[…]
Boyarsky also lauds Unruh’s many achievements, calling him “one of the creators of twentieth-century California,” whose blend of populism, idealism and pragmatism is reflected in “just about every mile of water project, every freeway, every new university campus, every civil rights bill, every piece of legislation protecting consumers, women, and children” - all of which “was won by ferocious combat, deal by deal. […] He accumulated power so he could make those deals and win those fights.”
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California is currently one of the most prosperous regions of the country. I could think of worse models for our future than California. Idealism tempered with pragmatism – not a bad combination. (This review, I should note, was also written before “populism” became a euphemism for “racism”, in a time when Warren’s campaign might have been described as “populist” with no need for any caveats.)
So that’s my argument (echoing Adam’s), I suppose. We shouldn’t lose our idealism, but we shouldn’t allow our idealism to cause us to lose sight of reality. We can be idealistic and pragmatic at the same time.
This post has been rather heavy overall, so I’ll close it with something fun.