From Good to Perfect

The 'Perfect' condemns the merely 'Very Good', and the audience roars its approval

Moderating the Democratic Forum

I moderated a Democratic Party candidates forum Wednesday evening in a public space in Medford, Oregon.   About 150 Democratic party activists attended.   I say they were "activists" because they had enough interest in the campaigns for a County Commissioner, State Representative, a Governor, a US Congressman, and US Senator to come to a two hour forum on a weekday evening.  That weeds out the uninterested.

I observed something that illuminates the Presidential race: activists condemn compromise. The choosing and sorting takes place by rooting out heresy, nuance, and balance.  Several people mentioned litmus tests.  They were a good thing.  Questioners wanted commitments and a show of hands from candidates. It was a liberal crowd.  Will you fight for universal health care Medicare for All, they asked the candidates, including a candidate for County Commissioner?   Do you oppose international trade agreements and will you fight to reverse them?  Yes or no.   Show your hands.

I found myself silently thinking of responses to the questions which peppered the candidates on stage, thinking of how I might suggest constraints and limits and the need for balance and accommodation to the opposition to what the questioners wanted:  much higher minimum wages, universal free health care, paying teachers more, more money for mass transit, fighting climate change, protectionist trade policies, end Citizens United, reduce the power of business interests, free college.   It is good I stayed silent.   This crowd did not want to hear about constraints.   They wanted better government, which meant those reforms, now.

Me, saying "Questions, not speeches!"

Oregon's legislature passed an aggressive new minimum wage bill, increasing the minimum wage to over $13/hour downstate and soon to be $15 in Portland. The law is very controversial since many businesses--and a united Oregon GOP--said it was a job killing, business-killing excess.    Questions and responses from the floor showed the new law was controversial in the audience but the controversy came from people who shouted out that $13 and $15 was not enough, that the Democrats sold them out by settling for too little.   Audience members demanded the panel raise their hand in pledge that they would immediately insist on a higher wage.

Same with health care.  The audience did not want to hear about the grinding politics opposing greater access to health care.   Medicare for all.   Anything less was a failure of principle and nerve.  It's value is so obvious it should have been easy and fast to accomplish.

Climate Change Activist at the Forum

Oregon's Senator Ron Wyden is a political liberal by nearly any definition, although he has what some Democrats consider the troubling habit of working with Republicans on some major legislation.   Some Scorecards show him to the be the most liberal member of the Senate Finance committee--http://goo.gl/Os61Oq ---   and according to the That's My Congress scorecard Wyden is the single most liberal member of the US Senate, with a score of 88.   By comparison Bernie Sanders and Al Franken are 75; Elizabeth Warren and Chuck Schumer are 63.   Other scorecards would show him merely to be among the most liberal but probably not as liberal as Sanders.  

One might think this would inoculate Wyden from criticism from the left.  No.  Notwithstanding Wyden's politics, national standing, excellent retail political skills and attentiveness to the "red" parts of his purple state, Ron got criticism from people who wanted more.

Wyden in Medford defending Planned Parenthood

A young candidate has filed a long shot campaign against Wyden and he appeared at the forum.   He condemned Wyden for being a "corporatist", a moderate, too quick to compromise with Republicans, a free trader who sold out working people.   He received loud applause and cheers from the audience.   The same mechanism that was working with the minimum wage controversy was working here against Wyden.  Democratic activists didn't want "good"; they wanted perfection, defined as the most extreme position advocated by anyone, not the best position possible within the constraints of budget and political opposition.

How a senator spends a Saturday

Was this a "Bernie Sanders crowd"?   Yes, largely, judging from the signs and tee shirts.  And that is part of my point: that is who shows up for two hour evening events.  Sanders people.   Bernie people at Democratic events; Tea Party people at GOP events.  At Democratic events it is members of public employee unions, people against pipelines, people against fossil fuels, people against banks, people for "Medicare for All".  (This is Oregon.  I heard not one word against guns.) 

Which brings me to Ted Cruz.   Lindsey Graham is now publicly supporting Ted Cruz even though two weeks ago he said that choosing between Cruz and Trump was like choosing to be shot in the head or drinking poison, and that if Cruz were shot to death on the floor of the Senate with 99 witnesses they couldn't find a jury who would convict.  Cruz's tenure in the Senate has been one of condemning RINOs, Republicans in Name Only, people who had compromised, people who weren't good enough.  That made enemies.  

Ted Cruz distinguished himself from Rubio on that point.  Rubio had compromised on a path to citizenship for immigrants here illegally, briefly, in the past.   Not Ted.  He was consistent and uncompromising and pure.

Now Ted has a second element of his positioning: he is an active candidate who is not Donald Trump.   People outside of Town Hall meeting rooms and candidate forums don't experience the pull toward the extreme that happens in that environment.   Cruz appears to be an impossibly conservative Senator from the outside (tied for most conservative with a liberal score of zero) but within the subset of Republican primary voter activists Cruz represents exactly what people insist upon: the pure deal, perfection.

The Republican party is in the midst of making a choice--are they a conservative party which blends the economic agenda of big and small business (low taxes, low regulations, free trade, inexpensive labor) with traditional social conservatives (anti abortion and gay rights) in which Cruz is the heresy-free uncompromising champion?  Or, is it a populist party that represents the economic and cultural distress of many Americans over the changing American demographic and pressures of globalization which demands a government with more services for middle income people at the expense of the interests and influence of the donor elites--the new Trump-style GOP?

Cruz, giving a good, earnest handshake at a Tea Party event

Why would Republicans pick Cruz,  such an extreme case alternative to Trump?   Well, I witnessed why at the candidate forum, when people applauded the more liberal alternative to Wyden, the most liberal of US Senators, notwithstanding Wyden's 40 year career as a liberal champion:   "very good" is not enough when there is an imagined perfection to strive for.