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this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2024
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And they will in 4 years. This is the time where progressives need to start grooming primary candidates for 2028. Not during the 2024 general. We need some young, viable progressives (who aren't going to Fetterman as soon as they win) to start campaigning now.
Democrats were never going to give up the incumbent advantage, and I'm legitimately surprised by how the media has been acting like it's a weird situation. It's giving people this impression that pulling your current leader (of both the party, and in this case, the county) and running someone else in their place is a viable strategy in US presidential politics.
If you want young, progressive candidates, now is the time to start bringing them to the forefront...
Note: apologies in advance for the biography that nobody will probably read... But I swear it's related! You could probably skip to the " TL;DR part, but ehhh c'mon
Not to tell my life story, but it relates and ended up typing up more than expected...
I have this very vivid, formative even, memory from 2004 of sitting down with my conservative, Republican, Evangelical Christian parents (basically just "lower taxes and stop abortion" days of conservatism, and the "you can't read Harry Potter" Christianity) and watching both party's conventions.
This was to be the first presidential election I was eligible to vote in, and I was taking it seriously. Up until that point I was still just mimicking my parents political (and unfortunately, religious as well) views, so I remember that we were supposed to be happy, etc, when we watched the RNC, and boo/ridicule the DNC. And for the most part, embarrassingly, I did those things.
It was almost like watching WCW. I even remember mimicking my father's sports-like taunts we made towards the Democratic party when he saw that Zell Miller (some old racist conservative who, I guess never got the memo that the Dixiecrats left the party, and was somehow still a Democrat at the time) was a keynote speaker for the Republicans. I'll say that again, one of the main speakers at the 2004 Republican National Convention, was a registered Democrat. Imagine that happening now, it would be like Rand Paul speaking at the DNC. Yeah he might openly disagree with the leadership of his party, but he would never do something like that unless he officially left the party. And even then...
"Well it's over," I thought. The Democrats really must be as bad as Fox News, and my dad, are saying, if their own party members are giving speeches in support of the other guy. I ended that night still thinking the GOP was clearly the only real option here...
Then a week later or whatever, we watched the DNC (on Fox News). It was a different time, but I do give my parents credit for making sure that we watched both conventions since it was my first time voting and they really wanted to drive home how important it is to be informed. They were not quiet about whom they thought I should vote for, but they wanted it to be clear that voting is deeply personal, and that the decision is ultimately mine to make.
Anyway, we watch the DNC, and for a lot of these speakers, it's the first time I've ever even heard of them. I was aware of Ted Kennedy because my dad used to "joke" about driving a car off a bridge, but had never actually heard him speak and even in his advanced age I remember being a bit like, "now hold on...". I had always been told that liberals were terrible people, but a lot of the stuff he's saying (in a silly voice/accent) was actually kind of making sense to me.
That's when I learned the term "bleeding heart" when my dad used it as a derogatory. And it just didn't make sense to me... We were an Evangelical Christian home, I had been raised on those exact same values. How is caring for others a thing to ridicule?
Anyway, finally getting to my actual point (if there ever was one). I was watching these speeches, and kind of thinking to myself, "this sort of makes more sense, and aligns more closely to my values that the things I heard at the RNC," but cognitive dissonance is a powerful thing, and it doesn't help that we're watching it on Fox News).
So we keep watching, and next up is some young, unknown state senator from Illinois with a weird sounding name. Barack Obama. And holy shit, I was enthralled the moment this guy opened his mouth. I know hindsight and that everyone says this and all of that, but I KNEW this guy was going to be President some day. He was just in his element, and everyone could tell immediately.
He didn't single-handedly undo the 10+ years of religious trauma that was keeping me as identifying as conservative, I'm embarrassed to say that I ultimately did not vote for John Kerry that year. But I definitely credit that speech as being one of my first major "wake up calls" that conservative ideology is rotten, and my misunderstanding of a single issue (abortion) was being used to elect awful people
And it was not only based on the quality and content of the speech (which made everything at the RNC look like Four Seasons Landscaping), but based on the fact that this previously completely unknown guy got a keynote (possibly even the keynote spot, I forget) slot at the DNC. You could tell that the party knew what they had with Obama, and within 4 years, he was goddamn President.
(TL:DR of sorts follows despite it just being the end of my comment):
So what I think I'm trying to say, after telling my life story that nobody asked for, and probably won't read, is that we need to be looking for our "next Obama" (using this simply out of convenience, I don't want another Obama) now. Like 4 years ago even.
We need to be grooming progressive state senators, community organizers, etc. and we need to get them on the national stage, and into the American consciousness ASAP. This is the time to be doing this for the next election (hopefully we will still have them).
I apologize for this crazy long message nobody asked for lol. I will probably not proof read so sorry if something doesn't make sense..
It was kind of just coming out of me and may even have helped me process how much of an effect that 2004 DNC Obama speech had on my change/growth as a political person.
Anyway, thanks for coming to my TED talk.
First off, I want to say that I appreciated you telling your story here. I'm going to argue against some points, but I think it was a good comment even if there are points I disagree with.
No other leader has been this old. And there have been plenty of times where a party's leader didn't run for reelection. What's doomed is a challenge. If Biden had followed the rumor from 2020 and stepped down after a single term, Democrats would probably be in a much better position.
The "incumbent advantage" has led to 3 of the last 7 incumbents losing. It's not a bulletproof strategy, particularly if the incumber is very unpopular.
Nah, everyone loves a "convert". Tulsi Gabbard has been a featured speaker at CPAC since 2022. Just like Zell, it's not really a Democrat highlighting Democratic values while supporting a Republican, it's a conservative with a good story to tell about how the other side went too far.
Do you even remember who the 2020 DNC keynote speaker was? I don't. And that's not because we don't have inspiring speakers (AOC is a fantastic communicator, Ayanna Pressley is one of the best orators I've ever heard), it's because the party establishment finds Obama-level politicians threatening. Looking it up now, they had 17 different people all give part of a speech. No risk of a rising star in that mish-mash. That's why, despite several political disasters under their watch, the leadership was the same dinosaurs, only to very recently be replaced by their long term acolytes.
Remember, they didn't want Obama to be president. When he ran for president he was the outsider because the party establishment was all lined up behind Clinton.
Hey, I'm just glad someone read my comment lol...
What is a party if not just a group of people with similar values? Change the values of the Democratic party from within (which I believe is already happening, especially with all the ancients dying off) to the type of party that realizes when they need to start grooming new candidates sooner.
Easier said than done, sure. Young people need to show that they are a voting bloc that demands to be taken seriously, but that can't happen until they actually start voting. It's kind of infuriating. That's really the thing that could begin fixing all of this, and yet... Who knows, maybe Taylor Swift will throw a wrench in things and get enough young folks involved.
As for Obama, maybe he was a once in a lifetime phenomenon, I don't know... But like you said, the DNC didn't even want him. He was a black guy with an Arab name, but he had the money and power of the DNC (and, I believe at that time Howard Dean in charge who actually knew how to get progressives elected up and down ballot. Could be wrong though, it might have been after he lost his career for getting a little too excited), and that allowed him to mobilize people who had never thought about voting before.
That's what we need again. We need to start bringing up young, charismatic progressives from state and local politics, and give them the money and support they need to get their message (which, let's not forget, is correct) to those types Obama mobilized back in 08.
We should have been doing this for years already. In fact, I would say Howard Dean's removal as chair of the DNC especially doomed the party to years of tepid neiliberalism.
We need another Howard Dean running the DNC and we need it yesterday.
The party is very separate from the people who vote for it. I don't have a vote for who becomes Speaker, only a vote for my individual representative, who himself is chosen by both Democrats and Republicans (our primary is open and everyone knows the Democrat is going to win the general election so the real election is in the primary). He's in something like a D+30 district and still threatens to oppose Democratic legislation unless it's more fiscally conservative.
The ancients are dying off, but this isn't resulting in an open race for replacement, they're using their influence to pass it on to chosen successors that share their values. Theoretically there could be a revolution, but politics isn't really just a battle of ideas, but a complex web of relationships and fundraising. One of Hakeem Jeffries primary qualifications for succeeding Pelosi is simply that he can raise a lot of money.
But I agree that's not fixed, and a good chair could really lean into candidates who excite voters rather than are approved by donors. The Obama's of the party win while the machine politicians generally just maintain power in safe districts. You need someone who excites people to flip districts and states.
It's unfortunate that Katie Porter might be eliminated in the initial round in California. We need progressive successors to our own ancients in the senate. Massachusetts has a pretty good bench getting built. Hopefully when Warren steps down Ayanna Pressley will succeed her. I'm not sure if Bernie has anyone in Vermont lined up.
Can't really disagree with much there.... I would say that a party's views (should) reflect those of its voters. Ideally, that's what's supposed to happen in a representative democracy. They're supposed to represent the will of their constituents, and if they aren't, you vote in a new one (obv it doesn't really work out that way in the real world. Maybe Finland or something).
And this is kind of what I'm talking about.
There's this defeatism everywhere lately (much of it is astroturfing, but I believe it's been somewhat effective, unfortunately) with people being like, "I'm totally a leftist (often sus), and the conservative Democratic party is just going to run their establishment candidate no matter what and there's nothing I can do so I'll throw away my vote on a third party, if I vote at all."
Some'll throw in something about "Genocide Joe" too, somewhat betraying their actual intentions and the true reality that most of them want nobody left of Donald Trump in that office...
Yet everyone seems to forget that Hillary Clinton very much was the establishment candidate in 2008. It was "her turn." Obama was just another nobody's on a debate stage with like a dozen other relative nobodies, and Hillary Clinton. It would have been like (if Trump actually attended the debates, just a thought experiment) if Doug Burgum, or Will Hurd became the GOP candidate over Trump despite the party doing everything it can ($$) to get Trump as the candidate. It would be unheard of.
In other words, Democrats were making preparations for her coronation. And none of that ended up mattering, because Democratic primary voters wanted Obama. I personally switched my affiliation from "independent" to "Democrat" to make that vote.
None of that mattered because the liberals/progressive/the left/etc.(voting) public made it very clear that they didn't give a shit what the Democratic party wanted, they want "that guy who gave that speech at the 2004 DNC." And that's who we got, and Hillary Clinton didn't run as a third party candidate or anything silly like that. We almost got it to happen again with Bernie... Different situation and discussion, though I do think things could be very different at the DNC now that Hillary is out of electoral politics .
(To be fair, Obama's demographics, and social media teams were on point and like a decade ahead of their time. Probably pretty rudimentary compared to that (or literally just the fact that they had a social media team)
It’s not surprising or weird, I just wish we weren’t here