The Real Battle Ahead

Bob Herbert is echoing the concerns of many progressives in his column today. Herbert is wondering whether the two Democratic candidates and their campaigns will be able to keep the peace in the party during the primary struggles ahead, while simultaneously looking for every vote they can find. The fact that the party has coalesced around candidates who will be struggling to break new ground in gender or race, in addition to fighting the usual battles of a general election against the Republican nominee, makes keeping the primaries civil all the more important.

Some observers are looking to see what advantage each candidate has in electability by attacking the other Democrat over their susceptibility to the right-wing smear machine. We can be sure these attacks are forthcoming and can only hope the Swift Boaters will not be aided by those who would save us by doing their work for them. There are legitimate reasons to test the policies, records, and plans of the candidates as compared to the other, but what will lose the election is a no-holds-barred level of attacks on a personal level.

Let’s talk about what’s at stake in electing one of these candidates. The necessity of taking the White House away from those who would continue America’s slide into being a garrison state cannot be overstated. Our legitimacy in the world is severely wounded by the policies of this Presidency since September of 2001, when the United States had the sympathy and solidarity of most of the planet’s citizens and then abused it in search of supremacy.

Our nation now suffers from a level economic inequality not seen since before FDR. We have citizens being thrown out of homes and poor people unable to find protection in bankruptcy laws. We have many Americans without adequate healthcare and housing, even as the top end of the economic ladder grows richer by the day. We have a continued drain of jobs to the developing world and no serious effort to retrain those who are affected or to invest in the industries of the future.

We compound the inequalities that exist today in America by continuing to tolerate a stratified social order. Poor people of color, both descendants of slaves and immigrants and their children, fight for an equal piece of the pie, while politicians on the right use the fears of the well established to divide the haves from the have-nots. Women still struggle to make as much in the workplace as men while the right complains that too much is made of feminism and gender differences. The Supreme Court is stacked with justices who would negate both civil rights law and privacy laws in an effort to turn back the clock of American justice. Gay people struggle against hatred by those afraid of sex in general and homosexuals in particular, while our leaders talk about “family values” of intolerance.

Our planet itself is laboring in a struggle with a potentially fatal warming trend, accelerated by humans pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at astounding levels. Our nation responds to overwhelming evidence of scientific studies by agreeing to study the problem further and doing little to implement serious changes needed to assure human survival.

These are the problems our candidates need to address. Let’s agree that either of the Democratic candidates would be a vast improvement over the status quo right now and hope that one of them will be able to attract the wholehearted support of the other as we move eventually into a general election campaign. There’s way too much at stake to grievously wound the winner in the process.