In a world where the sitting president pardons a family member, an incoming president nominates sex offenders, and countless Americans celebrate the murder of a businessman in New York, it is tempting to want to stick your head in the sand for the next few years and hope for the best, or at least that the worst doesn’t happen.
Hopefully, there aren’t too many sand-heads reading The Voice; it’s more important to try to figure out what’s happening and why, because there’s always room to improve.
Susan Dyer Reynolds has already written for The Voice a review of the results of San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors election that doesn’t rely on wishcasting. It is, she says, likely to be a lot less of a moderate board than many people are assuming.
So let’s look at the national election.
When San Francisco’s own Nancy Pelosi stepped down from her position as leader of the Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives a couple years ago, she was succeeded by New York congressman Hakeem Jeffries. Pelosi was considered, even by many Republicans, to have been one of the most effective speakers of the House in American history, and people were watching Jeffries closely to see if he would continue in her style. That was answered in the affirmative by watching him keep the House Democrats completely united while the Republicans kept tripping over their own shoelaces during the Lord of the Flies fight over the House speaker’s role a year ago.
Jeffries probably spent a fair amount of this past election season expecting that come January, he would be elected speaker of the House. Now, he’s set to be minority leader again, a tricky role in a chamber that will have an incredibly narrow majority for the GOP. It also means he has the potential to score some major wins if he plays his parliamentary cards right, keeping his caucuses’ hands clear of the worst excesses of the Republican majority and setting his party up to retake the House in 2026. Can he? Can the party? It likely depends on if they know why he’s not going to be speaker in January.
As James Carville and Bill Clinton distilled it in 1992: It’s the economy, stupid.
On a Dec. 2 talk in San Francisco, Jeffries told KQED’s Marisa Lagos what he thought of the national election results. He didn’t blame men or women, red hats, pronoun abuse, or other red flags to the crowd on the left.
Tellingly, Jeffries said “the disappointment of the election, as we process what took place, certainly across the country, within the battleground states and beyond — I think the clear message was that the American people want the Congress and those in government to deal with the dramatically high cost of living that is impacting working class people of every race and of every region, all across the land.”
Or, as James Carville and Bill Clinton distilled it in 1992: It’s the economy, stupid.
Jeffries later said both parties are vulnerable to economic angst, because “there’s a broad dissatisfaction. What it connects with is that the basic contract between so many Americans and our great country has always been that if you work hard and play by the rules, you should be able to provide a comfortable living for yourself, for your family, purchase a home, educate your children, have access to high quality health care, go on vacation every now and then, live that comfortable life, and one day retire with grace and dignity.”
So he seems to get it.
What doesn’t receive enough attention when people praise Pelosi’s House Democratic leadership tenure is her determination to support her whole coalition. She was careful to protect her moderate Democrats who might be vulnerable in swing districts. From Jeffries’ comments last week, it sounds like he’s staying in the Pelosi tradition (and for people who might think Pelosi is pulling all the strings behind the scenes, when asked how often he talks with Pelosi, Jeffries said he does talk with her about things, but he hadn’t talked to her in a week).
Recriminations
On Nov. 15, the conservative Washington Times tried to make a story of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez no longer listing her “she/her” pronouns on her X bio. It’s a big “who cares” for most of the world, but some people thought it implied that AOC was backing off on one of the “woke” left’s idiosyncrasies. The real story, as the Times article went on to explain, was a bit more muddled (it’s a she didn’t/did/didn’t situation). But it’s a meme that captured the debate running through many Democratic circles in the days after the November general election: Did the party yoke itself to a widely unpopular social movement, overemphasizing transgender rights, critical race theory, and other controversial matters?
Well, probably yes and no.
Yes — in that the general left (as opposed to the far left) let its far-left brethren set the tone of the debates on such issues, and that was a mistake. The far left, just like the far right, wants to make social and economic changes that are not broadly popular, and they both have a lot of anger they want to translate into government action. The progressive left wants to police language to an extent that would make Mao’s Red Guards jealous. It wants to enforce conformity on a notoriously rambunctious people. It pushes solutions that don’t solve problems and in some cases exacerbate them.
And no — in that there are actual problems that the liberal party should pursue, but shorn of the professional woke prescriptions. Blacks, American Indians, and other citizens have been discriminated against, and discriminated against to a degree that white Americans would never have allowed against themselves. People should be able to do with their own bodies what they want, even if others disagree. Billionaires do have too much power, and such things never end well (ask the Romans and King Louis XVI).
What I would love to see is for the Democrats and whatever remains of the nonextremist wing of the GOP to develop a politics based on broadly accepted American norms: We won’t try to run your life, you won’t try to run my life; and the government will keep people safe, will regulate the economy enough to make sure it’s open to everyone, and won’t have the power to socially engineer the country.
Am I optimistic? I’m a short-term pessimist, but a long-term optimist. But we only get from one to the other if our heads aren’t in the sand.