Democrats' Bench Looks Pretty Terrible Right Now-- It's What Decades Of Neoliberalism Does

What happened to the Democratic Party’s bench? Most of the ones who are promoting themselves as potential candidates if Biden doesn’t run— Kamala, Mayo Pete, Gina Raimondo, Joe Manchin, Eric Adams, Mitch Landrieu, Hillary Clinton, J.B. Pritzker— are so terrible that I wouldn’t vote for them even against Trump. This is a vision of a neoliberal, corporate shit-show, not the party of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. I hope Bernie runs… or Elizabeth Warren or Jamie Raskin… In his New York Magazine column yesterday, Ed Kilgore concluded that “Democrats better hope Biden serves out the rest of his current term and runs for a second. Otherwise, Democratic candidates will need to start all over introducing themselves to the voting members of their party. Right now, a lot of them are basically nonentities.”

We’re screwed.

That said, Simon Rosenberg wrote a worthwhile post yesterday about how Democrats win. He’s a relatively conservative, corporate Democrat— founder of the New Dems— so you always have to be careful when reading him, but…he’s a smart strategist and he has some good suggestions. He’s working on some ideas for a Democratic messaging agenda. He’s calling it “A New Agenda for Women and Families” and his idea is to “go on offense on a series of issues critical to women and healthy kids and families, and not let the anti-woke ridiculousness and ongoing MAGA extremism continue to drive this important debate.” He lists 9 suggestions for inclusion:

• Protecting women’s reproductive health, codifying Roe

• Common sense gun laws— assault weapons ban, background checks, etc

• Steps to restore integrity to our discourse— privacy laws, regulation of social media, more….

• A national campaign to improve teen mental health

• Expansion of Medicaid to all 50 states

• Paid family leave

• Something about protecting intellectual freedom in schools (no book banning, screwing with teacher tenure, etc)

• More affordable child care

• Ways to expand housing across the US

The last two were suggested to him by his readers. I hope he understands how important they both are, especially the final point, which isn’t on the priority list of many New Dems.

He has pointed out that the anti-woke agenda isn’t popular outside of MAGA world and that “the right wing lunacy on all these issues are giving Democrats a big opening to occupy space being abandoned by the right.” For example, he posted this polling to show what Americans want for schools:

I’ve long believed the right misinterpreted their overperformance in the NJ and VA Gubernatorial races in 2021. Their strong showing there was much more about the fears and frustrations with COVID and kids, then it was CRT/Wokism. And as COVID fades, as does the memory of the social unrest/”burning cities”/dislocation from COVID, the fuel for this brief anti-work boomlet is evaporating.

Part of the reason I think DeSantis is struggling right now is that he built his candidacy in the summer and fall of 2022 around a very right wing interpretation of a set of issues born during COVID, including “shutdown Democrats,” that now as COVID fades simply don’t have the power or resonance he was counting on. His early campaign narrative is an amateurish misfire, and he may not get a second shot; and certainly he has taken positions which are going to make it very very hard for him to win the general election in battleground states which have rejected MAGA 3 consecutive times.