General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: In 18 years since Naders run, what has been accomplished by attacking the Dem party from the left? [View all]Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)They were all good people, they'd all have been better than any GOP candidate they faced., and Carter deserved a second term.
But their whole presence in the fall came off as "eat your spinach".
Each of them would have done far better had their fall effort been a positive call for change...had they offered something that sounded better..."Hope and Change", in other words.
And, despite the myth, none of them ran as liberals IN THE FALL. They all ran as bland, mundanely competent technocrats. This country doesn't elect mundanely competent technocrats. That was the strategy that had already failed twice against Reagan in the California governor's races.
Our nominees in the Eighties presented themselves as backing as conservative-sounding an agenda as possible.
Mondale, in his acceptance speech in 1984, implied that Carter had been to liberal and essentially apologized for that supposed liberalism. He proposed a tax increase, but not to fund anything that would help Democratic voters-only to "lower the deficit"-an issue that nobody cared about in 1984 and that virtually no one who'd even think of voting Democratic EVER cared about.
Neither Carter, Mondale, nor Dukakis reached out to connect with the energy of the activists fighting Reagan(and often stopping him through the mobilization of mass public opposition)on many domestic and foreign policy issues...from factory closures in what was then called the "Rust Belt" to Reagan's barbaric policies towards the people of Central America-issues where the polls showed the public strongly against what Reagan was doing.
It was going to be tough to beat Reagan in any case, and probably tough to beat George Bush with his following Reagan and latching on to the tail-end of Reagan's appeal, but the strategy we chose in each of those campaigns...obsess on looking "centrist" and focus on accusing the other party of extremism...was never going to work.
We needed to sound as though we were not only going to be better, but inspiringly better. When we are called "liberal", we need to actually defend liberal and progressive ideas and make a case for why they are better for the public. And when we are smeared, we need to follow Bill Clinton's example and fight the hell back against the smears.
All of those were things our party's strategists refused to even consider doing in 1980, 1984, and 1988. Their strategy, over and over again, was to have the fall campaign say nothing, express no passion, inspire no hope or enthusiasm, and somehow hope to win by default.
THAT is what failed in the Eighties. Not any supposed "liberalism", let alone any supposed leftism.