Democratic hopefuls need to drop by
In the middle of his hectic and ultimately fatal campaign for president, Robert Kennedy took the time to visit West Virginia, a state with few convention delegates.
Kennedy, who announced his candidacy a mere six months before Democratic convention delegates were scheduled to select a nominee, had a lot of campaigning to do in places like Indiana, Nebraska, Oregon and, yes, California (where he lost his life to an assassin’s bullet.)
Kennedy did not have to campaign in West Virginia, but he did, both out of sentiment – eight years earlier his brother Jack virtually clinched his own nomination for president with a victory in the Mountain State; and because he felt it was important to lay down a marker: a candidate for the nation’s highest office had an obligation to speak to and to touch as diverse a collection of Americans as was humanly possible.
American presidential politics is a vastly different enterprise today than it was in Kennedy’s time. For one thing, active campaigning begins a whole lot sooner. It’s only March 2019 and cable news is already running hard toward November 2020: wow, we’re still a year away from the first official votes of the campaign being cast.
For another, we’re vastly more polarized today. Not more divided, mind you. Kennedy ran for president during a time of stark divisions in the country: the Vietnam War was like a meat cleaver, sundering the generations and entire families.
It was still possible, however, for a politician of one party to reach across the divide in an effort to capture the attention and the votes of members of the opposition party.
Kennedy implicitly vowed to do so; Hubert Humphrey, the vice president who became the Democratic nominee for president, did. So did Richard Nixon, the Republican standard-bearer.
Voters were open to persuasion. One of the evocative moments of the 1968 campaign took place as Nixon barnstormed across Ohio and a young girl held aloft a sign for the candidate to read. “Bring us together,” it said.
Today, voters don’t want to be brought together. They’d much prefer to retreat to opposite ends of a rock-strewn field with a moat and no drawbridge between them. “You stay in your camp, I’ll stay in mine,” is the message a lot of votes send.
Politicians, ever eager to please, are paying close attention; primordial sentiments are hardly to be ignored, after all.
That’s why it was good to hear Senator Bernie Sanders this past week say he intended to campaign for president the old fashion way — by speaking to the other side.
During a made-for-TV “town hall meeting”, the Vermont senator and sometime Democrat (Sanders is a registered independent in Vermont, though he caucuses with the Democrats in Washington) had this to say:
“I go not only go into communities which are progressive or Democratic – we head out to Trump country (as well). And we are going to talk to those people… I suspect that a majority of the people who voted for Donald Trump will understand that he is not their friend.”
Sanders vowed to expose Trump’s lies and deceptions for the edification of voters who pulled the Trump lever in 2016. “Trump told people he was on their side,” Sanders said to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer and a roomful of residents of Washington, D. C., before making clear he did not think the president was on the side of average Americans at all.
It is clear that Sanders believes his style of populist liberalism – health care for all and a $15 minimum wage — will outshine Trump’s nativist conservatism – a border wall and attacks on the press — on the 2019-2020 campaign trail.
Let me suggest this: Sanders as well as the other Democratic presidential candidates (declared and undeclared) should take an early flight to Pittsburgh. And instead of venturing out to Oakland, to speak to college students, or to the Hill District, to address African-Americans, they should make their way to Fayette and Greene counties.
Either place would provide a stern test for any Democrat who wishes to campaign against type. Donald Trump clobbered Hillary Clinton here in 2016 – rounded out, the reality show star-real estate tycoon scored 34,500 votes to Hillary’s 18,000 in Fayette and 11,000 to 4,500 in Greene.
If that doesn’t count as “Trump country” I’m not sure what will.
It’s been some time since national Democrats paid close attention to the kinds of people who live in the counties outside of Pittsburgh. Well within living memory, western Pennsylvania was solidly Democratic. There was a reason this was so. Democrats looked after the interests of working class Americans. In turn, blue collar workers lifted a succession of liberal Democratic administrations to victory at the polls.
Then, starting in the 1990s, it began to slip away for a variety reasons, including NAFTA and Bill Clinton’s flirtation with Wall Street.
Democrats can’t ignore the people who live in these places, not if they want to build an electoral coalition strong enough to give the nation durable, effective leadership for years to come.
“There’s … a feeling of unhappiness in the country,” Robert Kennedy told reporters in early 1968, before he began his quest. “If someone touched the heart of that … if he could bind the wounds, appeal to the generous nature of Americans …”
Ah, but that was long ago. Today’s politicians don’t necessarily think that way.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.