I see the Democratic failure this year as 1 more reaffirmation that timidity & ignoring your party’s ideals or running away from the leader of your party, especially one who is president, will not help you get elected. You don’t have to be progressive, but you need to show clear distinction from your opponent. You can be a moderate, but basing your campaign on what the polls say rather than speaking about your principles (if you have any, which if you don’t, nobody wants you running except those who want to manipulate you), & saying you like coal & guns & you just might not have voted for your party’s candidate in the last couple of presidential elections, are not the ways to distinguish you from your opponent, which should be so easy to do if your opponent is a greedy, self-serving, lying obstructionist. Running away from your president & allowing disinformation about him to go unchallenged is a recipe for your whole party to lose. You should be able to find something about him that you like & the majority of the public likes & defend it. There are some rather remarkable feats to which you could allude, such as Obama reducing the unemployment rate from 10% to 5.9%, or the stock market rising from below 7000 to above 17,000, or the deficit under Obama dropping to 1/3 of what it was (& compare these statistics to the previous administration in which they were all highly negative), or Osama bin Laden having been killed (after 7 years of futility from the previous administration), our auto industry surviving then thriving under Obama, the huge growth in the energy industry toward energy self-sufficiency – all of which are achievements that (if widely known & believed) the vast majority of Americans would approve of, along with whatever else you might like from his accomplishments on health care, beginning at last to confront climate change, etc. Actually, if you look at what he accomplished, this especially feeds those moderate, conservative & corporate members of the Democratic Party because they are all goals conservatives clamor for, & he did it without any help from the opposition, who, if they could ever manage to achieve anything close to it, would loudly & proudly cheer about it whenever & wherever they can, if the president who achieved it had been of their party. Of course, the Republicans instead demonized the Democratic president as someone so disastrous he deserves impeachment. The incongruity of this position with reality & the public lack of awareness of this disconnect are mindboggling. That is a combination of the Republican domination of the message, the negligence & complicity of the media, & the ignorance, gullibility & apathy of the general population.
Despite this shellacking, I keep reading from Democrats, “don’t worry, we’ll win in 2016”, because of the inevitable growth of their base – youth, minorities & single women. Don’t be so sure! Most minorities, especially those who are poor, see their concerns not addressed; their lives not improving, even with a black president. They rightly feel that they’re taken for granted. Latinos keep being strung along with promises that immigration will at last be addressed (& finally it may have happened, but it had to wait until after the election, according to some wrong-headed Democratic political strategists). The youth don’t see much difference between the policies of the Democrats & those of the Republicans – at least the result seems virtually the same for their prospects. The long term problems that concern them most – such as the future habitability of our planet – are not being addressed. Another potential Democratic constituency that is growing by leaps & bounds – the poor – is definitely not seeing improvement no matter which party rules. They have been left out of the picture now for decades, since MLK, JFK, RFK & LBJ fought on their behalf (3 of whom were assassinated, & the 4th sidetracked by war before getting sufficiently far in their struggles against poverty & economic injustice. For 40 years, poverty & the poor have hardly ever been mentioned by either politicians or the media. All 3 groups (which have considerable overlap, of course) had high hopes of “change” (which they assumed to mean improvement) under Obama, & they’ve been very discouraged. If they couldn’t get it from Obama (& by now, the vast majority within these groups have not seen meaningful improvement in their areas of concern during their lifetimes), they have little expectation of getting anything from any Democratic or Republican candidate; & since their choice is relegated to only those 2 parties, they’ve become disengaged. The only way they would get interested in a presidential campaign, is if there were a candidate that speaks to them. That candidate certainly is not Hillary Clinton, who is too tied to the corporate establishment that has been pulling the strings, preventing progress & undermining our democracy. There are a precious few politicians who have been saying the things that need to be said, but only about 3 – Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders & Robert Reich – have gotten significant national attention, & appear to have any chance at attracting these core constituent groups with their messages.
The Democratic Party is at a crossroads. Either they distinguish themselves with progressive ideas about how to overcome the longstanding problems this nation faces, or they face irrelevancy, with a new progressive party emerging to replace them (the optimistic scenario), or the US continues to drift towards totalitarianism under the corporatists of both major parties, falling further behind the developed world, & becoming a very divided & explosive nation with a 3rd world economic status while maintaining, at least for a while, a 1st rate military status.