These are lean times for Arkansas Democrats, and the 22nd annual Clark County Clinton Day Dinner drawing partisans from all over Southwest Arkansas was stressed for a keynote speaker this year.
I did the job at Henderson State in Arkadelphia on Saturday night with the usual disclaimer: I am not a Democrat, but a newspaper columnist who tells the truth and therefore usually sounds like a Democrat, and, for the record, I’d speak to Republicans, too, if they asked, a dare that Republican women in Pope County took me up on a few years ago. We had a swell time.
But I thought I should tell all readers that I explained to these Southwest Arkansas Democrats how they could win — nationally, for president, though not in Arkansas for a statewide or congressional office. The latter seems quite out of the question, although Donald Trump’s behavior and the GOP health-care debacle have me pondering whether to ponder further.
First, I told the Democrats to de-obsess on Trump — though I sure as heck won’t in my columns — because the special counsel’s investigation is a legal and not political matter and is going to be whatever it’s going to be regardless of Democratic wishing and wailing.
Second, I told them what I believe to be Trump’s thinking, to the extent that he’s capable, or the thinking of his team, to the extent that there is one. It is that he needs to hold his extremist base at 35 percent, hope the economy continues to perform well and that Republicans will see fit to return home reluctantly to him in 2020 and, finally, count on the Democrats favoring him again with an ineffectual opponent offering no clear or compelling message or connection to working white people.
Third, Democrats could thwart that plan with a good candidate offering a clear and compelling message, which I said I didn’t have but could envision a broad outline for.
And this was it: You seek to combine Bill Clinton’s message of 1992 — “the economy, stupid” and “I feel your pain” — with Ross Perot’s outsider political reform message of that year railing against what he called “gridlock” and what even more people now decry as destructive partisan dysfunction.
In 1992, the economic message and the Democratic base gave Clinton 43 percent. The political reform message gave Perot 19 percent. That’s 62 percent, and it left an incumbent Republican president with but a pitiable 37 percent.
I submitted that a Democratic candidate could combine the Clinton working-class connection — Bill’s, of course, not Hillary’s — with the Perot assault on politics as usual and take a shot at drubbing Trump or any other Republican in 2020 in the way Clinton and Perot, in combination, drubbed George H.W. Bush.
For its economic message, Democrats ought simply to have it out between Bernie Sanders’ socialist policies and Elizabeth Warren’s anti-Wall Street populism and some upper-Midwestern adaptation of Trump’s as-yet hollow promises to renegotiate trade deals with working folks’ interests more in mind.
It’s not bad for a political party to have competing ideas about how to help people. It’s bad not to have any ideas at all, at least that get effectively communicated.
For the assault on politics as usual, I suggested that Democrats endorse a constitutional amendment to undo the corrupting Citizens United ruling that money is speech and cannot be limited in our elections in its use by those blessed to have obscene disposable sums of it.
There is, in fact, a draft of such an amendment going around. A few state legislatures have passed resolutions supporting it.
It says: “Congress and the states may regulate and set reasonable limits on the raising and spending of money by candidates and others to influence elections. Congress and the states shall have power to implement and enforce this article by appropriate legislation, and may distinguish between natural persons and corporations or other artificial entities created by law, including by prohibiting such entities from spending money to influence elections. Nothing in this article shall be construed to grant Congress or the states the power to abridge the freedom of the press.”
To summarize: Congress and states could put caps or prohibitions on direct fundraising by campaigns and on outside expenditures seeking to influence votes coming from political action committees or other legally organized funds, except that the press could continue to advocate editorially for election outcomes under the First Amendment.
I don’t know if the wording is sufficient for a complex purpose. But I know that such a composition would be politically effective when read and waved at political rallies, partly because Republicans could be counted on not to like it.
And there is the hypocrisy factor: Democrats would be calling for an end to open-ended money laws even as they availed themselves of open-ended money laws.
But individual Democratic candidates could eschew PAC assistance and point out that, under Citizens United, they can’t stop independent groups from spending money to attack their opponents, which is the very problem.
Bill Clinton’s old line about wanting to enact campaign finance reforms but not disarm unilaterally until those reforms are enacted — that always seemed reasonable to me.
It’s like this: A college football coach could decry new rules from the NCAA defining holding that he believed allowed players to hold. The coach could call for reform of the rule. But, as long as the rule was in effect, he would coach his offensive lineman on how to hold legally.
I told the Democratic audience one more thing: The political advantage goes to the first party that takes the initiative to concede to the opposing party on a point or two to seize the middle ground and forge a reasonable fix on Obamacare.
Republicans have been strung out trying to repeal and replace it. Democrats have been standing idle waiting for Republicans either to fail in that effort or replace Obamacare with something disastrous that takes health insurance from millions.
But now that drama has run its exciting course. The people are left needing health insurance with costs that are under control. Politicians ought to be running over each other to get in front of the cameras to be the first to offer a logical compromise.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.