Democrats 2020. Don't groan. They need a candidate.

You cannot beat something with nothing.

One of the problems with the Hillary Clinton campaign was that her campaign was a collection of constituencies and a liberal orientation, but not a diagnosis of the current state of the union and a solution.    I listened to five Hillary Clinton speeches live and up close and dozens of them on television and I share the widespread opinion that she had a list of legislative policies, but not a simple, clear repeatable justification for her election.

I told you so:  Click Here

I have said this before, on the day before the 2016 election, when I summarized her closing argument, which I summarized as ineffective and mushy: "I am warm and nice."

The next morning on election day, I posted my supposedly laughably improbable prediction of Trump's victory.  

Donald Trump wanted to Make America Great Again.   It was short enough and clear enough it could fit on a hat.

The past 6 months have been chaotic for the Trump administration and some Democrats will take heart from this.   They need to beware, because the past 6 months have been a continuation of the months of the Trump campaign: Trump is the exciting, newsworthy, bumbling, controversial, bull in a china shop while Democrats remain in essentially the nowhere-ville that they were with Hillary.  He is a mess but Democrats are nowhere.  

You cannot beat something with nothing.

No Democratic candidate has emerged because no Democratic position has emerged, and there is a simple reason for that.   Democrats are divided.

Hillary people.  One group of Democrats--their core base of educated professional people with college degrees--want the system to work better because their orientation is toward fairness and inclusion.  They want reform but not economic revolution, because the modern economic system of global trade and education as the entrée' to the middle class works pretty well for them.   Manufacturing takes place offshore but the financial, marketing, and accounting functions take place in the USA and those are the jobs they possess.   This archetypal Democrat is an educated woman with a desk job in a blue state on the salt water or fresh water coasts or in a college town in the heartland.  They like issues like family leave, like equal pay for women, equal rights for the LGBTQ community, and easier access to college for their children.  They support Planned Parenthood.  They like decorum in politics,  They care about the environmentalist and are happy to have businesses be "good citizens."  They are offended by the subtle and not-so-subtle racial resentment and xenophobia that Trump nurtured in response to cultural changes.  They are appalled by Trump, and therefore being anti-Trump is a sufficient platform.   

Bernie people.  Another group of Democrats, the progressive, Bernie, Jill Stein, Nader wing, is where the fervent energy is.  They seek fundamental change, not reform.  They perceive Democrats who work with those businesses as having been co-opted and have sold out.   They perceive the great businesses of America as deeply destructive.  They are not progressive allies; they are the enemy.    As one correspondent put it to this blog, listing malefactors:

"***Apple is one of our most egregious corporate tax dodgers.  I won't take time to give details. They are laid out in a 2013 Forbes article about Apple's years-old Irish holding company scheme. Go to https://www.forbes.com/sites/leesheppard/2013/05/28/how-does-apple-avoid-taxes/#1b37d4c120a7

***Pfizer and the other players in Big Pharma assure that we pay much higher prices for their drugs in the US than people do in Canada and elsewhere. When Medicare Plan D was adopted, Big Pharma got Congress to forbid the U.S. government from negotiating drug prices.

***And what can one say about Exxon except that it has been devastating the environment for decades and is determined to keep the nation committed to a fossil fuel economy."

A real divide

The reformer wing of the Democratic party is content with leaving in place the current system, big auto, big energy.  They want reforms like higher fuel standards, something politically hard enough to do, evidenced by Trump having recently reversed Obama's initiative.  But such a response leaves in place that system, an inadequate response for people who seek a commitment to end a fossil fuel economy.

Few of these big-change-Democrats believed that Donald Trump would in fact "drain the swamp" of corporate power, but he talked a good game.  Trump's cabinet choices fully disabused them of any hopes they might have have had, but the desire for big, deep fundamental populist change remains, only this time from an electable Democrat.  They welcome an anti-corporate,  swamp-draining candidate, not a reform candidate.

The divide is real.   The DNC tilt toward Hillary means the Democratic Party lacks credibility as a big tent unifier.  Until a candidate emerges who has credibility with both groups Democrats will be unable to present a plausible alternative to Trump, and such a bridge-builder may be impossible.   They will be hard to please because the words are deep and suspicion is high.

Potential candidate senators and governors who hold statewide have baggage in the form of donors, friends, and interests.   To paraphrase Shakespeare's Polonius, we get a little soiled by working in the world, and the Democratic bench may not be good enough.