Deeply Messed Up

The Democratic primary has officially gone on too long, and we haven't even had the Iowa Caucus yet.

The last minute quasi-entries of Michael Bloomberg and Duval Patrick are profoundly weird. There seems to be no constituency for Bloomberg, and Patrick's work for Bain Capital would likely be largely disqualifying.  Because the Democratic primaries begin in lily-white Iowa and New Hampshire, candidates like Kamala Harris are struggling to find their footing. They moved California earlier, but she isn't really running strong there, either, nor has she connected with South Carolina's overwhelmingly African American constituency.

Basically, we've come down to the following categories:

White Left of Center: Biden and Buttigieg.  They are presenting themselves as moderating influence on a party moving to the left in ways that are genuinely concerning for a general election (much less governing with a closely divided Senate). Biden and Buttigieg are promising a boring presidency where you don't have worry about whether the president has gone off the rails and called nurses sexual degenerates or allied the country with Uzbekistan in an ethnic cleansing campaign.

White Change Agents: Warren and Sanders. They are presenting themselves as fundamental change agents.  You think the system is broken? They have a plan/revolution for that.  Their primary appeal is the angrier part of the party, who is convinced that everything is messed up and we need to a proper cleansing.  Both rely on a left wing populist pitch.  Warren is seeing both good and bad by being the current lead female candidate.

Surprising Flops: Harris, Booker and Klobuchar.  All three of these candidates bring something really compelling to the table.  Yet none of them have been able to break out. I was a Harris supporter, and I would be happy to vote for her in the primary, but there doesn't seem to be much chance she'll still be around in April.  Booker has amazing charisma in a party that love young charismatic candidates. Klobuchar could have easily been what Buttigieg has become: the center-left alternative to Biden.  Maybe one of these guys gets a surprisingly strong showing early on, but they feel like they could be winnowed sooner rather than later.

Why do Bloomberg and Patrick feel the need to jump in?  Their lanes are already full and that's not counting other candidates like Castro or Yang who have at least some support,

What's worse is the very nature of Democratic politics. The policy differences between a change agent like Warren and center-left candidates like Buttigieg are real but even Buttigieg is proposing policies that are further left than what Obama was able to do.  But the echo chamber nature of social media and the overwhelming need to defend "your candidate" is tearing the party apart.

Yesterday, someone posted a video of Pete Buttigieg offering a fairly blase statement about the need for a "new politics," one that wasn't rooted in non-stop partisan warfare, but also didn't return to the "Obama and Clinton era" politics of Grand Bargains and Triangulation.  OK, sure.  What will that look like and how do you accomplish it are kind of huge questions. Biden has presented himself as a continuation of Obama's politics (if not his policies) and so Buttigieg needs to differentiate himself from Biden by presenting himself as the bold new voice.  But because he seemed to make a slight criticism of Obama, people lost their shit.  I didn't see much criticism of Obama, and Buttigieg clarified that he wasn't referring to Obama's presidency, but it was enough to royally piss of some people.

I went on Twitter and said I didn't see a slam of Obama, but rather a recognition that the old Grand Bargain/Triangulation politics are gone.  Biden says he can get Mitch McConnell to work with him because some Republicans voted for the Violence Against Women Act.  WTF?  So Buttigieg says that those politics are the past and we need a new politics that recognizes that the GOP has gone insane without continually exacerbating partisan tensions.  Whatever, it's pablum.  But when I tried to make this argument, that Buttigieg was going after Biden and not Obama, I get attacked as a Buttigieg supporter.  When I note that the only presidential candidate I've contributed to is Warren, I basically got called a racist, and by a writer I generally admire.

Winning elections in our electoral system requires making broad coalitions.  Trump has abandoned this and gone with a base strategy, which I think should be disastrous.  But if the Democratic party degenerates into a massive internecine bloodbath, we could be in real trouble.

I started out supporting Booker and Gillibrand.  She's already out and Booker never caught fire. I moved to Harris, but Warren won me over rather than me losing Harris.  Still, I would happily pull the lever for any of them.  And if it's Biden or Buttigieg, I'll vote for them next November.  My only question is whether the party will survive that long.