Presidential Primaries: A Perspective on an American Electoral Left

The final installment in this three part series makes the case that the presidential primaries are/should be/could be a national political discussion – happening only every four years, at best – that a permanent American electoral left should participate in eagerly. The  first article in this series, “An Obama Primary Challenge?” argued the importance of challenging the President from his left.  The second, “Know Thy Rules: The Effectiveness of a Third Party Challenge” addressed the ways in which the structure of the American political system hampers the “third party” route taken in numerous other nations.

Part III

Why is it so hard to understand the need for a primary challenge to Barack Obama?  When Jesse Jackson ran in the 1988 presidential primaries, pretty much everybody understood the point.  No, he wasn’t going to get elected president – or even win the nomination, but the reasons for a primary campaign don’t end there.  What Jackson would do was say what needed to be said.  He would get ideas shared by a lot of people onto the front page for the first time in a long time, maybe ever.  He would point out the nation’s shortcomings on the domestic front as well as our excesses on our many foreign fronts.  People would talk to each other about them; some would organize.  Other candidates might even have to address some of this for once.  As he used to put it, he would “keep hope alive.”

The Obama “Hope” posters notwithstanding, it seems obvious that Jackson’s “hope” is very much in need of life support these days.  Even those convinced that the President has fought the good fight, that in his heart he remains a man of peace, and that our problems are all due to Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats, must certainly recognize the still growing gap between rich and poor, as well as the fact that we currently bomb more countries than in the Bush years.  Whatever else may be the case, by now it seems clear that just being the change we wish to see doesn’t cut it as political strategy.  We need government committed to making the change we wish to see.  And for that to happen, at the least, we need someone spelling out the nature of that  change – on the national level, much as Jesse Jackson once did.

The surface arguments against challenging Obama are the fears that it would somehow weaken him and might alienate Black America, the group that formed the base of Jackson’s campaign.  The reluctance to promote an alternative vision seems to run even deeper, though, for the fact is that the Jackson candidacy was an anomaly.  A look back at the last two presidential campaigns – when there was no Democratic incumbent – may provide a more typical example of the American Left’s unwillingness to support candidates aspiring to promote its ideas.

When the Republicans lost control of Congress in 2006, the most widely cited cause was the Bush Administration’s war in Iraq.  So when the Democratic takeover produced virtually no impact on that war, it seemed inevitable that Iraq become the defining issue of the 2008 presidential race.  And yet primary voters did not back the serious antiwar candidates who were available, with the result that by Super Tuesday, the only remaining Democratic presidential aspirant pledged to complete troop withdrawal was Mike Gravel, the former Alaska Senator and prominent Vietnam War opponent, whose exceedingly modest campaign never netted so much as a half of one percent of the vote in any primary or caucus.Before the race was over, Gravel would actually bolt the Democratic Party entirely and join the Libertarians.

Meanwhile, the small “l” libertarian Republican Texas Congressman Ron Paul mounted the most unlikely, and most successful antiwar candidacy of the entire presidential season, although by Super Tuesday it too had become quite marginal.  The later stages of the race were then dominated by Democrats Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama – who were not committed to removing all American troops from Iraq during the four-year term that they sought – and Republican John McCain – who did not appear committed to removing them during the twenty-first century.  If anti-Iraq War sentiment had once been a defining electoral force, it was not any longer.  And along with the antiwar movement went any notion that a significant electoral left existed in America in 2008.  We might say it committed suicide.

Some thought any sense of urgency about the Iraq War left the Democratic race with the departure of John Edwards.  As a U.S. Senator, Edwards had voted to authorize the war, just as Clinton had; and also voted to fund it, as both Clinton and Obama had.  As a presidential candidate, however, he had tried to carve out some kind of acceptable antiwar campaign position, that is to say, to the left of the other well funded candidates, but not too far to their left.  Media critic Norman Solomon’s generous interpretation was that Edwards’ position on the war was “evolving,” once calling him “the most improved presidential candidate of 2007.”  And, in fact, by the time Edwards withdrew, he was calling for the removal of all combat troops within a year.  In many respects he was the 2008 version of Howard Dean, the former Vermont Governor deemed the “electable” antiwar candidate four years earlier.  Neither proved either as antiwar or as electable as most supporters wished, however.

The antiwar candidate from whom many Dean and Edwards backers averted their vision was Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich. In 2004, his supporters used to say that Kucinich actually was the candidate many people thought Dean to be.  Both had opposed the Iraq War at the start, but where Kucinich continued to call for complete U.S. troop withdrawal in ninety days, Dean grew vague on the question.  Similarly, up until the day he withdrew from the 2008 race, Edwards still envisioned 5,000 troops guarding the U.S. Embassy in Iraq at the end of his projected first White House term, a possibility that only made sense in the context of an ongoing military occupation.

Edwards’ candidacy met pretty much the same fate as Dean’s: premised upon their supposed electability, both quickly melted away once that premise proved chimerical – unlike the issues-based Kucinich campaign which chugged on through the entire 2004 primary season.  In 2008, however, Kucinich found himself shut out of network television debates before the first votes were even cast in the Iowa caucuses.  (The networks were likely only too happy to do this, of course, but were able to justify his exclusion with polls showing antiwar voters not supporting antiwar candidates.)  2008 proved less a reprise of his prior campaign than of the 1992 effort of Larry Agran, the once and future mayor of Irvine, California, who ran on a platform similar to the then-recent Jesse Jackson candidacies, but was deemed too obscure to participate in the presidential debates.

Kucinich’s withdrawal from the race ended what slim chance remained for any presidential primary discussion, not only of immediate withdrawal from Iraq, but of a Canadian-style single payer health care plan, a serious critique of free trade policies, and a range of other issues.  Gravel remained, true, but while his positions (quite close to Kucinich’s, with the exception of a flat tax plan) were quite serious, his fundraising was not.  Where the less than $4 million Kucinich had raised by the end of 2007 was quite insubstantial compared to Clinton’s $115 million and Obama’s $102 million, it was nonetheless an order of magnitude larger than Gravel’s $379,795.  Raising less than Jim Gilmore (you’ll have to look that one up) had in pursuit of the Republican nomination, Gravel’s campaign was quite simply unknown to the overwhelming majority of the electorate.

Much of Kucinich’s 2008 difficulty undoubtedly stemmed from the fact that while his wire-to-wire 2004 campaign had arguably been the most significant left wing Democratic presidential candidacy since Jesse Jackson’s 1988 run, that wasn’t saying all that much.  Kucinich had netted but 67 delegates compared to the nearly 400 Jackson won in his first try in 1984.  So where Jackson’s supporters felt they had something to build on and went on to win over 1,200 delegates the second time out, many of Kucinich’s no doubt began looking elsewhere after the first race.
The disparagement Kucinich’s candidacy encountered from the right and center was only to be expected – and no doubt would have been far more vociferous had they thought there was any need to take him more seriously.

The criticism from the left probably deserves greater scrutiny, though.  A widely cited article on the Edwards campaign by Bill Fletcher, Executive Editor of The Black Commentator, argued that both Edwards and Kucinich “fell prey to the historic ‘white populist error.’ What is this error, you ask?” he wrote, “Simply put, it is the idea that unity will magically appear by building a campaign that attacks poverty and corporate abuse, supports unions and focuses on the challenges facing the working class, BUT IGNORES RACE AND GENDER.” (Capitals in original).  Given that Kucinich actually supported reparations for slavery, this seems less a seriously considered critique than a rote add-on to an article about Edwards, particularly in light of Fletcher’s later role as a leader of “Progressives for Obama,” despite obvious Obama’s failure to live up to the standards Fletcher previously enunciated. (Fletcher currently opposes a primary challenge to Obama on the grounds that it would alienate black voters – and the argument for a black challenger to Obama is certainly worth considering.)

This was not the typical left wing critique of Kucinich, though, and one wonders whether its wide circulation might have had something to do with its offering white leftists an out from having to do anything for better candidates with lesser prospects.  Many actually seemed to feel that Kucinich was too good on the issues.  Supporters of more “mainstream” candidates routinely acknowledged that he was better on Iraq or health care than the candidate they actually backed, but felt the country somehow wasn’t ready for that.  Certainly the Pentagon and the insurance industry weren’t, anyhow.  So why even try?

It’s true that when Jackson ran not everyone immediately got the point – mainstream political commentators continually asked, “What does Jesse want?” The real question, though, was what Jackson’s voters wanted.  Why did they break with the conventional wisdom that you “threw away” your vote when you backed someone you didn’t think had much chance of becoming the eventual nominee?  For some, of course, the main reason was that he was a black candidate who brought that community’s concerns to the attention of a wider audience.  For others, though, it was his platform that included creating a Works Progress Administration-style program to rebuild America’s infrastructure; a fifteen percent Department of Defense budget cut; reparations to descendants of slaves; a single-payer system of universal health care; increased federal funding for public education; free community college for all; and reversing tax cuts for the richest Americans and earmarking the revenue for social welfare programs.  In other words, it was a platform of the left, a platform very much like that of Dennis Kucinich.

Some of Jackson’s ideas – like the Canadian-style health care system – had never received front page treatment before.  Among other things, keeping hope alive meant keeping those ideas in the political debate.  But this was not to be.  When Jackson opted against a third try in 1992, those ideas were no longer to be found in the presidential discussion, Larry Agron’s efforts notwithstanding.  Four years later, despite widespread discontent over his tack to the right, no significant Democrat challenged Bill Clinton’s re-election.  And by 2000, the presidential primaries showed no trace at all of the ideas that had motivated Jackson’s base twelve years earlier – even with no incumbent in the race.
There have now been five Democratic presidential nominating conventions since Jesse Jackson’s last run.  In those gatherings, the sum total of delegates elected to represent a candidate with a platform similar to Jackson’s is the 67 Kucinich delegates elected in 2004.  Did those ideas disappear?  Obviously not.  Some, like a single payer health care system have steadily gained support, to the point where one state, Vermont, has started on the path of implementation.  What has disappeared, however, is the American Left’s will to take itself seriously – and with it any need for the rest of the nation to do so either.

Right now, pollsters for Rasmussen Reports tell us that 70% of Democrats support immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan, a position that, as of the moment, will be represented only in the Republican Primaries (by not one, but two candidates – Ron Paul and former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson.)  Rasmussen (whose polls are generally considered skewed to the right) also reports 39% of all voters (compared to 32% in 2009 Rasmussen poll) supporting a single-payer health care system along the lines of the bill recently re-filed by Senator Bernie Sanders.   Right now, that position would have no supporters in either set of primaries.

The Obama candidacy was supposed to be all about energizing and activating America’s youth.  Well, many of those once energized and activated are now alienated.  And what are they told today?  Be quiet.  Don’t go jeopardizing what we’ve got.  Not the wisest course, even for the Obama supporters, me thinks.

It may well be true that those who heard what Obama actually said during the 2008 campaign – as opposed to what they wanted to hear him say – don’t have all that much reason to be disillusioned with his performance.  But for a very large number of his voters it was not like that.  They thought that a community organizer would try to bring about real change.  They didn’t expect him to give the insurance industry half the loaf before the health care fight even began.  They thought he only said that he would expand the Afghanistan War and bring it to Pakistan because he had to say things like that to defuse the right.  They shouldn’t have thought these things, but they did.  Hey, if the Nobel Peace Prize Committee could fool itself, why shouldn’t the average American voter?  If anything, Obama’s backers might welcome a primary challenge as a way for him to try to restate his case and revitalize his base.  If he’s got something to say for his actions – and inactions – by all means, let him say it.  If nothing else, the man does give a good speech.

To some, a primary challenge is a diversion from what we really need to be doing – some type of “organizing” to provide a base for the change that we wish Obama really wanted to effect.  We need to become better, more active citizens – the argument goes – committed to “making” him do the right thing – as in that story about FDR once telling someone or other to “make me do it.”  Certainly we could actually benefit from more activism on all levels, but to argue that community or labor organizing can substitute for electoral activity is, well, a-political – in the real-world sense of politics.

The sad fact is that, since the Jackson campaigns, the American Left has largely opted out of the biggest political game in the land – the race for the White House, the national discussion that comes only every fourth year.  Right now, Obama faces a reelection campaign in which he will have to answer to no one to his left.  Oh, there will no doubt be some third party challenge or other, but few of even Obama’s harshest critics will want to run the risk of inadvertently facilitating a Republican take over of the White House.  One might even consider Obama guilty of an impeachable offense – the continued bombing Libya in violation of the War Powers Act – or an indictable offense (were the International Criminal Court to hold the U.S. to the same standards as militarily weaker nations) – the drone bombing campaigns in Pakistan and Yemen – and still recognize that worse is possible.   After all, we had it for the previous eight years.

But the need for careful action is not an excuse for inaction.  Do we really mean to tell every new young voter disillusioned with our never-ending state of war that the only place to go is to Ron Paul and the libertarians?  Do we mean to tell all the budding activists outraged at seeing the poor stay poor and the rich get richer, that there’s no room for that discussion in the presidential election process?

To commit to a primary race against Obama requires a vision.  A vision, first, of a 2012 nominating convention with a bloc of delegates committed to ending the corporate warfare state, and saying so.  And a vision of future conventions with blocs of delegates of the left large enough to make a difference in the policies of the eventual nominee.  All of this may seem like quite a stretch, given how lifeless the presidential nomination process has become.  It requires hope – not the passive kind where we keep our mouths shut, cross our fingers and hope that Obama will bend our way, but active hope.

Jesse Jackson was on to something.  Let’s find a candidate.  Let’s talk to people.  Let’s send some delegates to Charlotte, North Carolina next year.  Let’s make the president answer to us.  We may not be able to “make him do” the things we want, but I think we’d at least be heading in the right direction.