November 6, 2017--We Need to Get Off Our Butts

All the liberals I know are fulminating about Donald Trump and all the truly destructive things he and his administration are doing to America.

Rather than focusing on what we can do today, almost all are turning their attention to the 2018 midterm elections and the 2020 presidential race in which Trump has already announced he will run for a second term.

But almost all the liberals I know are not paying any attention to an important off-cycle election that will take place tomorrow, Tuesday, in Virginia, where the current governor, Terry McAuliffe is term-limited and thus unable to run for an additional term.

As a measure of the seriousness of the outcome in Virginia Bill Clinton and even Barack Obama campaigned for the lackluster Democratic candidate, Ralph Northam. They also pointed to the political opportunity represented by the down-ballot elections, most importantly races for the state legislature.

I know more than a dozen Virginia residents, all Democrats, and only one two of them have done anything more than talk about how terrible the Republican candidates are. I have not heard from any of them that they are canvasing door-to-door or manning phone banks to help bring out the vote.

All the recent polls show the race for governor and lieutenant governor to be a statistical dead heat. Political professionals from both parties are saying it's all about turnout. The winners will be the ones who can mobilize their supporters to vote.

Knowing this, as my well-informed friends do, there is still little action to speak of among progressives. Except for whining and complaining about how terrible things are. How, for example, if the Republican candidate, Ed Gillespie, wins and enough Republicans are elected to state office, women's reproductive rights will be imperiled and voting rights are likely to be curtailed. 

If that isn't enough to get my friends off their butts I don't know what will. 

Sadly, even the fear of that is not motivating a flurry of action. If I were cynical (and I am), I would suspect that my purple state friends would rather have things to complain about than make the effort to win.

Even sadder, I see this self-indulgent apathy to be endemic to the national Democratic Party. 

We've turned criticizing Donald Trump into an art form--feeling proud about our ability and cleverness to do that--but most liberals continue to look down their noses while mocking his supporters. But in the meantime, his people are mobilized and we are, well, wallowing in petulant passivity. All the while reminding anyone who will listen how smart we are.

You know what? We're not that smart at all. 

We may know our history, we may be more literate, more articulate, better educated, more reasonable, but what we are really good at is losing.

Who are our leaders? Chuck Schumer? Nancy Pelosi? Bernie Sanders? Joe Biden? Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren? Barack Obama?

Not including Obama, their average age is 72.  To make our agony worse, Obama, whom we pine for, is constitutionally unable to run for a third term. And even if he could, my suspicion is that he would lose to Trump who would again enjoy demonizing him.

As Harry Reid's former chief of staff, David Krone, recently told the New York Times, "There are killers and there are whiners. Unfortunately we have too many of the latter and not enough of the former."

If we can't get our act together to win this one--and with the scandals plaguing Trump, it should not be that difficult--2018 looms as a potential disaster. And unless we can come up with better candidates and get activated, we need to get ready for eight years of Donald Trump.

Ed Gillespie