The Democratic Base

I think I just watched the final nail in the coffin of the Democratic Party base. The date was Monday, February 3, 2020. Yeah, the Iowa caucuses.

For many years, the base of the Democratic Party was working class people - farmers, mechanics, welders, carpenters, longshoremen, roofers, plumbers, electricians, and all the rest of the people who actually created things that increased the wealth of the country.

Starting about thirty years ago, with President Bill Clinton, the Democratic Party has abandoned those people. They have either colluded with Republicans to bust unions, or stood idly by as the labor movement has been decimated. Helping people in poverty is no longer popular, or even discussed much among the Democratic Party leaders. War on Poverty? No, now it’s war on poor people. Raising the minimum wage to subsistence levels is actively resisted by the mainstream  party leaders.

I keep asking myself, “Why?” The answer came to me on Iowa Caucus night. The party represents a different class of people now.

This is the blind, ignorant, incompetent, arrogant middle management class that is now the base of the Democratic Party. 

They view working class people with disdain and contempt. They only mingle with them briefly during campaigns, then scurry back to their safe, walled mansions well away from the neighborhoods of the lower class. They fear them and loath them, and have worked assiduously to put as many of them behind bars as possible. Under Democratic (and Republican) administrations the prison population has exploded, until America has become the most imprisoned country in the world per capita. (With the possible exception of North Korea - we don’t have numbers on them.)

Just ask them. They are the smartest people around, and they can’t understand why everybody doesn’t realize this and let them run the country. They are the ones with degrees from the most prestigious universities. They have IQs up in the stratosphere. 

These are the people who ignored the concerns of the engineers and produced an airliner that automatically dives into the ground in spite of the best efforts of the pilots to stop it.

These are the people who bought a computer program for millions of dollars to make it easy for uninsured people to buy health insurance when they passed the Affordable Care Act. (Which did nothing to make it affordable. Just made it mandatory to buy it.)

Of course, it didn’t work. It was a complete disaster nationwide. It took months before the program could be debugged and become operable.

And then there’s Iowa. Nothing demonstrates the plight of the Democratic Party as well as watching Steve Kornacki waiting for the results of the caucus. And waiting, And waiting. Rerunning what the results were four years ago. 

With lots of air time to fill, and no news to fill it, some person on the news desk mentioned that here would be a great opportunity for one of the candidates to give a speech. Every TV station would broadcast it live, because there was nothing else to report.

Amy Klobuchar must have been watching. Within ten minutes she was at her campaign headquarters podium thanking her team and the great people of Iowa for helping her campaign succeed. She wasn’t too specific about what she succeeded at, but hey, it’s news coverage!

What happened? Well, the Democratic Party displayed their incompetence once again. In prime time TV in front of the whole country. I wonder if they are still scratching their heads and trying to understand why Republicans keep winning.

They decided to make the caucus reporting more detailed by not only reporting the delegate totals for the candidates, they decided to report the numbers for the first and second caucus alignments, too. In the interests of transparency, I’m sure.

In the past, results were reported by Precinct Captains by telephone to Democratic Party headquarters, where the numbers were tabulated and distributed to the press. That took a lot of telephones and operators to keep the lines open for fast reporting. Now there were going to be many more numbers to crunch.

So The Party decided to make an App for smart phones to transmit the numbers online. I don’t know if it was just for iPhones, or for Androids, too. It didn’t matter. They did not test the app before the caucuses. They did not give classes to the Precinct Captains on how to use the app. They also drastically cut the numbers of telephone operators, because now they have this app! 

It still did not matter. Just as with the Affordable Care Act software, it didn’t work. Leave it to the modern Democratic Party to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Now it is two days after the caucuses, and I’m still not sure who was first, who was second, etc. I just saw some numbers showing Buttigieg leading but only 66% of the results have been reported. That bothers me, because Pete’s money donors include union busters and bankers, according to the rumors I hear. That puts him square in the middle of the road with the rest of the ignorant, incompetent, arrogant base of the Democratic Party.

I long for the days when we had Democratic Presidents who were competent, even skilled, at something beside talking people out of their money. I remember a school teacher from Texas once upon a time, I wish he hadn’t gotten us into Vietnam. He wished it, too. I remember a President who could drive a nail straight, and put in a wall stud square. He’s still doing it, in his nineties. 

I have hope, but it’s fading. Bernie has fought for working people all his life, but he is getting old and we don’t know how much life he has left. Elizabeth is right in the middle of the university crowd, but she has a good record of fighting (and winning) for the consumer against the bankers. 

Alexandria Ocasio Cortez gives me hope there is a chance that change will happen in the future. If the blind, ignorant, incompetent, arrogant Democratic Party base doesn’t drive her and others like her away. 

Would somebody please wake up and look at the instruments? I swear this plane is diving straight at the ground!