The Myth of the Centrist Holy Grail
Heidi Heitkamp, the Democrat who represents the four heads of dead presidents in South Dakota, has a brother who hosts a local talk radio program. Why this doesn’t make the brother the shame and disgrace of the Heitkamp clan, the way that Charles Adams shamed John and Abigail by being a sockless drunk, is another topic for another day. One nice thing about being a talk-radio host whose sister is in the Senate is that you never lack for an emergency guest with a little national cred in their CV.
So it was on Thursday, when Joel Heitkamp had Heidi joining the program, and he asked her about her party’s most recent standard-bearer. From CNN:
Heitkamp, who is facing a tough re-election race in a state Donald Trump won in 2016, was asked Tuesday by her brother, KFGO host Joel Heitkamp, when Clinton will "ride off into the sunset." "I don't know, not soon enough, I guess," she responded. The host asked, "What's the answer?" And Heitkamp said again: "Not soon enough."
This, of course, is in response to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s having told some truths about the 2016 presidential election to an audience in India.
"I won the places that represent two-thirds of America's gross domestic product," Clinton said. "So I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward. And his whole campaign, 'Make America Great Again,' was looking backwards. You know, 'You didn't like black people getting rights, you don't like women, you know, getting jobs, you don't want to, you know, see that Indian-American succeeding more than you are. Whatever your problem is, I'm going to solve it.'"
Anybody who attended a Trump rally knows how right HRC was in saying what she did. I’m not entirely a fan; I voted the other way in the Massachusetts primary for all the reasons that anyone did. But there is no question that what she said in India was an accurate summary of the forces that propelled our current president* to the job he now holds. Racism and belligerent, weaponized nostalgia were the accelerants that fueled the fire. It might have been economic insecurity that made people Trump-curious, but it was the xenophobia that got them into the halls.
However, the Heitkamps were not taking this barefaced truth sitting down.
"I mean, she's bashing the middle of the country and my state again. I don't need her to do that," the host said during the exchange about Clinton that began about 12 minutes and 30 seconds into the interview. "Yeah, I know," Heidi Heitkamp responded.
Oh, please, dude. Who the hell are you when you’re at home? If you’re feeling a little guilty about the small part South Dakota’s three electoral votes played in putting the current clown train on the rails, you probably should, but don’t be pounding the nails into your own palms for show. You did it. You’re responsible. You guys haven’t voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since LBJ in 1964. You voted for Nixon three goddamn times, once against your good neighbor, Hubert Humphrey, and the last time against your own senator, George McGovern. It’s not HRC’s fault that your significance to the Democratic party has waned over the decades.
To be fair to Heitkamp, she’s not alone in tossing a candidate who got 65 million votes overboard. A lot of people went running for cover. Again, CNN:
Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown told Huffington Post: "I don't really care what she said. I just think that that's not helpful." Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill told reporters on Capitol Hill when asked about Clinton's comments: "Oh, come on," adding, "You're killing me here." Clinton's former 2008 campaign manager was critical of the comments during an appearance with HLN's SE Cupp. "Look, this was bad. I can't sugarcoat it," Patti Solis Doyle said. "She was wrong and clearly it's not helpful to Democrats going into the midterms and certainly not going into 2020. She's put herself in a position where Democrats are going to have to distance themselves from these remarks and distance themselves from her, particularly those Democrats that are running in the states that Donald Trump won."
It really is time to stop buying every voter in certain states a cookie. You people saddled the nation with a corrupt, incompetent oligarch who turns everything and everyone he touches into hazardous waste. You did it because he stroked your cultural and social yearnings until you trilled like a chorus of locusts. You are done no good service by politicians who keep telling you that you’re the salt of the earth, or by reporters on expedition who demand that the rest of us be careful of your tender fee-fees. If you want the country to stop being moronic, stop voting for morons.
Conor Lamb’s delightful surprise victory in Pennsylvania has been celebrated far and wide as a return to a successful Democratic economic message and, indeed, the centerpiece of Lamb’s economic pitch was to tell Paul Ryan to piss up a rope regarding Ryan’s plan to gut the social safety net. The result also showed that organized labor still can muster some clout. Both of these are good things.
But to use Lamb’s victory as a club against “identity politics” or “cultural issues”-which, in this context, means people of color and other groups fighting against a kind of re-marginalization that seems somewhat popular among the economically insecure-is to end up in the intellectual junkyard in which we find our old pal David Brooks on Friday morning. Brooks is flailing so desperately to avoid the responsibility he and the rest of movement conservatism have for foisting a vulgar talking yam on the Republic that he drafts Lamb into his Church of the Poisoned Mind. From The New York Times:
The question of 2018 is whether the Democrats will follow suit. The temptation will be strong. In any conflict the tendency is to become the mirror image of your opponent. And the Democrats are just as capable of tribalism as the Republicans, just as capable of dividing the world in self-righteous Manichaean binaries: us enlightened few against those racist many; us modern citizens against those backward gun-toting troglodytes. Listen to how Hillary Clinton spoke in Mumbai last weekend.
Don’t worry, though. Here comes Conor Lamb, with David Brooks whispering a muted Agnus Dei behind him.
He emerges from a serious moral tradition. He is a Catholic who attended a parochial school run by the Christian Brothers. “They really make an effort to go out and be with people on the margins,” he told The New Yorker’s Eliza Griswold. He campaigned in a way designed to bridge divisions, not exacerbate them. “There was a lot of foolishness in this election and a lot of really cartoonish campaigning,” he told reporters. “And I think by the time of the president’s visit last weekend, people were kind of tired of that entire approach.” He embraced issues that grabbed from each political persuasion, for universal health care, against the tax cuts, but also for fracking, against the assault weapons ban, skeptical of the $15 minimum wage. He opposed both Nancy Pelosi and Paul Ryan in congressional leadership races.
(Not for nothing, but I think that, before either Brooks or Lamb start talking about the serious moral tradition of the Christian Brothers, they ought to make a few calls to Ireland on that subject.)
This attempt to drag Conor Lamb into David Brooks’ Cloud Cuckoo Land of Responsible Centrism is simply a load. Lamb suggested that it might be time for Nancy Pelosi to step aside as a Democratic leader, but he told Paul Ryan that Ryan’s whole economic philosophy is a façade of a mockery of a sham. These two are not the same thing, and I suspect that, if the Democrats in the House re-elect Pelosi as their leader, she and Lamb will get along just fine. His opposition to the assault-weapons ban-which, we should note, is not on offer anywhere at the moment-is based on his belief that there are laws enough at the moment. However, he is in favor of closing the gun-show loophole, which is something.
But, more pertinent to our discussion of David Brooks’ most recent foolishness is the fact that, despite Lamb’s holding the positions that so warm the Brooksian cockles, the Republicans spent millions of dollars in ads promoting the notion that Lamb was a gun-grabbing Pelosi-bot anyway. This means, of course, that the Republican side of Brooks’ tribalism remains truthless and insane.
Outside of Sherrod Brown, the person in national Democratic politics who best represents the actual economic interests that Democrats like Heidi Heitkamp think should be paramount is Senator Professor Warren. Does Heitkamp-or David Brooks or, say, Joe Biden-truly believe that if SPW went out there pitching her attack on the oligarchy to its primary victims in the red states that she wouldn’t be swamped with culture-war attacks anyway? (See also: Pocahontas.)And that those attacks wouldn’t be considerably effective among the voters in Salena Vitoland? Please.
Last week, SPW raised holy hell about a terrible banking bill that virtually guarantees more extravagant piracy and another economic disaster. Claire McCaskill voted for that bill. So did Heidi Heitkamp. The next time she’s on her brother’s radio program, he should ask her why she voted for a bill that guarantees that the yeoman farmers of South Dakota will be bailing out various mega-banks in the future. The answer ought to be interesting.
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