This is the next of a new series of missives on our unfinished work to restore the promise of our country and its government. Each will focus on a single element of the many opportunities and challenges that lie ahead. Each will provide three steps we can all take to build upon our huge victories winning back the House in 2018 and the Presidency in 2020.
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Moral and political courage have been on our minds for six years now. Watching Republican cabinet officers and elected officials, many of us wonder: If you were an elected official, and you knew your friend or ally or leader was diminishing your country, or imperiling it, or falsely claiming election fraud or even considering a coup, would you say something? When would you say it, and to whom? Like so many, would you instead keep your lips tight, fearing recrimination from Donald Trump that would be so severe that your own career would be threatened, or ended?
Would you hope that someone else steps forward, in your mind thus relieving you from doing so? In the meantime, would you offer veiled criticisms of Trump, hoping that those listening would read between your lines? Would you tell yourself you were still looking for the best opportunity to stand up? Would you convince yourself that your silence about the huge threat to American helps you move otherwise useful things forward?
Maybe you are Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, carrying out most orders and resisting some, all of the time shaking your head, lasting as long as you can but never letting the press and public know the awful things you know. Maybe you are Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, privately questioning the President’s basic intelligence, finding him uninformed and dangerous, but walking away silently. Or, you are Attorney General Bill Barr, peeping but once as the Big Lie grew and grew, now remembering your one moment of truth and forgetting all else.
You are Mitch McConnell garbage feeding month after month to get your Supreme Court Justices. You are Jeff Flake and Bob Corker, easiest with your criticisms when you aren’t running, or Susan Collins and Mitt Romney, capable of moral outrage but providing the votes in the Senate when the Republican caucus needs them.
Moral courage has been absent from nearly the entire Republican party. Every reason to not step forward has been exercised, even in the face of the threat to the peaceful transition of power. Mercifully, there have been a few members of Congress who are willing to put their careers in the balance to combat the insurrection and attempted coup. Several are from Congressional districts that Trump won by a large margin. All are as “conservative” as Trump in the normal usage of the word. They include Nancy Mace of South Carolina, who voted to hold the always contemptuous Steve Bannon in contempt of Congress, farmer Dan Newhouse of Yakima, Washington, who never said a bad word about Trump until he voted to impeach him, and Liz Cheney of Wyoming who has been at the center of the Congressional effort to bring justice forward.
All three are running in contested primaries, Mace in June and Newhouse and Cheney in August. All three have Republican opponents endorsed by Trump, none supported by him for any reason but that they have bought into the Big Lie. Thus, this summer we finally have the uncommon test of whether a small number of courageous conservative elected officials can stand the tallest among their colleagues, brave the greatest retribution, and help our country right itself. Even though it is not the intent of these Republicans to boost us in the November election, their success will do so.
In the meantime, Joe Biden is trying to get people to notice two monumental things events that took place this week in America. First, 431,000 new jobs were reported. This eleventh consecutive month of gains over 400,000 has returned employment back to pre-pandemic levels. Second, COVID hospitalizations sank to their lowest point in the pandemic. Joe Biden’s role in these two outcomes should be extolled.
Biden has been the leader of the resurgence of NATO and the emergence of far greater sanctions of Putin and Russia than had been thought possible. Russia’s economy is broken. Distinguished appointee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson survived her Ted Cruz/Josh Hawley sliming ordeal and will soon become the first African-American woman on the Supreme Court. Millions have returned to the workforce as schools have reopened, Democrats are hoping that the American voter will notice all these things during the midterm elections in November.
It is certainly possible that voters will recognize Biden’s considerable achievements, but it is not inevitable. Independent voters are even less approving of Trump than they are of Biden, but they have been slower to turn away from Trump’s acolytes like Kevin McCarthy, who would run the House if Republicans take it back. The most likely Republican leadership in the House is made up of McCarthy, Jim Jordan and Steve Scalise, far to the right of the Republican leadership in the Senate. With these Trump enablers waiting in the wings, it is the challenge of the next six months to speed up the recognition of who they are. Many independent voters like the idea of divided government, but these “leaders” come from a Republican party the independent voters will not recognize if they look more closely.
Meanwhile the millions of resisters who have stood in Trump’s way for six years need to spark themselves before November is upon us. Let’s do these three things:
| 1) Find One More Republican of Conscience | |
 | Roy Blunt of Missouri is retiring from the Senate after thirty years in Washington. On numerous occasions he has called for Trump to stop re-litigating the November 2020 outcome. He has said the election was properly certified based upon the reported results. He works across the aisle, often with Amy Klobuchar. He sides with Mitch McConnell and against Trump as he recruits candidates for the Senate. He purports to love the Constitution. Is he really going to walk away from the Senate in November without ever underscoring and seeking to minimize the damage caused by Trump’s claims of a stolen election? The very least we can do is remind him that shying away from a threat to his country contradicts the service he has sought to provide. He will be back in the state quite a bit over the next month. Call his St. Louis office at 314-725-4484. |
2) Figure Out How to Walk the Walk | |
| Now vanished are the millions of dollars from Democratic donors who supported Amy McGrath’s Senate candidacy to unseat Mitch McConnell in 2020. The bitter realization is that Amy McGrath did not have a chance to win the race, and that donors got so overwhelmed by their antipathy to McConnell that they ignored that fact. Of course, the lesson is that when seeking the most favorable results we have no choice but to target our dollars carefully. That is why Swing Left is starting by emphasizing only six Senate races. Under Swing Left's plan we would start by emphasizing the opportunity to flip the Senate seats in North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and seek to defend seats we hold in Arizona, Georgia and Nevada. Further targets may appear in Ohio, Florida and Missouri but Swing Left wants us to make certain not to get ahead of ourselves. Another important approach is to support the underlying work that makes victories in these states possible. The volunteer organization Walk the Walk is intent on supporting the organizations that undergo organizing efforts on the community level, emphasizing disenfranchised communities. This is an outstanding focus in response to the voter suppression efforts that Republicans are advancing in the same states. Check out the specific partnerships that Walk the Walk has forged and give this initiative a boost. | |
3) Turn Yourself into a One Person Campaign Team | |
 | You could live in a community where people of similar political persuasion are few or difficult to find. It is also possible that your schedule makes participating in group projects difficult. In these cases, you can dive into campaign projects on your own. One good bet is the Progressive Turnout Project. Among other things, they have been engaged in producing 27 million personalized postcards. As a part of a broader array of campaign strategies, they are a proven tool that is associated with the high turnout that we have achieved of late. You can sign up in a minute and adopt an outstanding, useful alternative to fiddling with your phone. If you do ten a day starting now you will have sent 2,000 to swing voters before the election. |
Joe Biden is 78 and he isn’t tired. It is time to give our efforts an upgrade. The other option is to stay the course while Donald Trump is calling Putin a genius.
David Harrison
Bainbridge Island, Washington
