Thank you for continuing to share these messages with your friends. If you are not already on our mailing list, please click here to be added to our list. You can also follow me on Facebook where you can read and share these messages. The more people we can reach, the more we contribute to this growing movement. We share these posts on our blog, A Path Forward to November 3, 2020, every two weeks, which means there will be a total of 100 missives before the Presidential election of 2020, in which our country will select a whole new course.
Let’s start by choosing and electing someone who has huge dreams but who in the shorter term is obsessed with fixing things. In their first month, this new President would call France, Germany, and Canada and say we are sorry. They would recommit to NATO, and re-sign a Global Climate Accord while demanding more of it. They would join Russian and China back at the table for a new Iran nuclear accord. They would stop writing naïve love letters to Putin and to Kim Jong Un.
This person would be running the show without a shred of venality and with a surprising dose of equanimity. They would partner with Congress to get immigrant kids out of the camps, restore and greatly expand Obamacare, and rewrite one of the worst tax bills in history. They would immediately rescind a score of executive orders that have been trashing the environment.
Regarding this short-term agenda, all of us would say to this new president, “these things first”. We will be thrilled to imagine an America even better than that, but these things first, because they are so critical, because they vanished from us so recently and suddenly, and because we miss them so desperately. Foster your even greater dreams, but don’t let those more distant goals make you stumble as you take your first steps.
This approach is no sacrifice, it is an imperative. We will judge ourselves by our ability to repair the very things that have been broken before our very eyes. We will elect a President who will rely upon a tool kit, and not only a microphone.
It is time to narrow our field. Our pre-conditions have been the same for months now. Nominate someone who can win, conceding that prematurely insisting that someone is unelectable creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. Look at when and where our candidates have won before. Find someone around whom we can close ranks. Make certain the vice president slot creates a ticket that brings us even closer together. Don’t buy into the non-existent huge differences between “liberals” and “progressives”, since the Senate voting records of those bearing these labels are nearly indistinguishable.
Government has rules and practices (and even a Constitution) that Trump, a “businessman” has never mastered. So no thank you Tom Steyer and Andrew Yang. Your ideas and commitment are clear, but you need more grounding in government itself. Steve Bullock, Michael Bennett, Deval Patrick, you have both the necessary good approaches and the record of service. We have never known how to get you out of the wings and onto the stage.
The Presidency is an incredibly taxing job. Maybe it is not so wise to nominate someone who is as old or is even older than Donald Trump, especially if we are hoping that they serve two nation-restoring terms. So it’s time to elevate a fresh generation of leaders, which already gave us Barack Obama. Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, you will surely find your ways to help this country. Thanks for jumping in, Michael Bloomberg. Your financial support and your ability to challenge Trump as a bigger billionaire are very helpful.
Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, and Pete Buttigieg, in no way are you done. One of you may be vice president, and there are other paths. Pete Buttigieg, it is a depressing indication of American cynicism that the most severe criticisms by your detractors are your impeccable answers to our questions.
Elizabeth Warren, you of the scores of new plans, please continue your recent move toward casting these for the country and not just our party. Your intellectual strength and relentlessness are admirable. Within the Senate you will help our new majority forge much of our changing economic and social policy.
Senator Amy Klobuchar, please be our President. Put to use your clear and strong sense of what can be done next, including much of it in an initial one-hundred-day flurry. You already know how to do what you need to do, and you will be able to get and keep us by your side. Your exemplary record on immigration reform, on economic opportunity, on health care reform, and on protecting the rights of women and minorities will help you lift us.
Be President with the same matter-of-factness, attention to your roots and good humor that characterize you. Tell us the truth. As you have already shown you can do, reach out to all independents, and to any legitimate Republicans that are left. Especially on global security issues, reach out even to the other side, however lost in darkness it has become.
We will do everything we can to elect a new president. During the impeachment trial, we will hear a week of evidence that will overwhelmingly demonstrate that Donald Trump is unfit for office. It is fashionable to say that the electorate is locked in on all sides and that impeachment arguments do not move the needle. It is fashionable, but it is not even close to the truth.
With the swing state margins that have become commonplace in American politics, every major event moves the needle. In these states, millions of independents walked away from Trump in 2018 and must not be drawn back to him. Countless other potential voters, including those aged 18-30, are deciding whether to register and vote, which they did in great numbers in 2018 but did not in 2016. The impeachment, advanced under Nancy Pelosi’s leadership, can help those voters decide to help us win.
| 1) Making Sure We Have Our Facts Straight | |
 | It would be nice to avoid disputes among Democratic candidates about false claims in speeches and in political advertising. Unfortunately, in the heat of the campaign, things can get said that shade the truth. Bernie Sanders has made some claims about Joe Biden's position on Social Security that Politifact has sorted out. Politifact is a great independent source that can help us sort out our positions and our understanding of events throughout this upcoming year. You can connect with them on Facebook, Twitter or receive their RSS feeds. You will be helping take truth off of the scaffold. |
2) Make Certain the Impeachment Trial Has Witnesses | |
 | Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and Mitt Romney are very likely to vote to call John Bolton as a witness. As has been so often the case, they need one more Republican Senator to join them. This is a situation in which Mitch McConnell is complicit. Three Senators are free to vote their conscience, and any fourth Senator will be excommunicated for doing so. Tennessee Senator Lamar Alexander is retiring. He grew up under the Tennessee politics of Howard Baker, who was the fair-minded senior Republican serving with Democrat Sam Ervin during the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Watergate hearings. It is time to ask Lamar Alexander to be true to that legacy, and to vote to call John Bolton as a witness. Call him at 202-224-4944. |
3) Do What You Can to Make Amy Klobuchar President | |
 | You can sign up to volunteer for Amy Klobuchar or give them your email so you can hear more. If you are going to make a donation to anyone during this presidential campaign, now is the time to do it. |
For those who would like to read an excellent, very well-reasoned and well-researched daily analysis of the challenges we face, go no further than Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American, Across this country, we are all paying attention now, and this year we are bending history.
David Harrison
Bainbridge Island, Washington
