Democratic Voters Deserve Leaders Who at a Bare Minimum Respect Them -- and Competence Would Also Be Nice
This week, the post-Blue Tsunami world launched with a resounding thud. Fresh off a historic election that was driven in large part by the public's disgust with the Trump regime's incompetence and venality, along with a huge dose of anger about the war of choice in Iran that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth played a major role in starting -- and then botching miserably -- there was momentum at long last for Democrats to take action against a Trump minion by impeaching the testosterone-obsessed warmonger.
But then eleven Democrats in the House failed to show up for a key vote to impeach Hegseth, allowing him to skate when only eight more votes would have prevented the impeachment from being shelved. In my mind, I heard the unmistakable sound of sad trombones, soon drowned out by my anger at the Democratic leadership.
Yes, people are not putting enough blame on the 211 Republicans who saved Hegseth (for now). That there were not even a few Republicans (dozens of whom are now lame ducks) who were willing to say, "You know what? I've been a loyal soldier all this time, but this is finally my chance to stand up against war crimes and in defense of simple decency," tells us all we need to know about any supposed lessons that Republicans might have learned from their midterm drubbing. They were and are a cult, and the idea that any of them have been waiting to be freed from some imagined involuntary servitude to their dear leader is now unmistakably exposed as a fantasy.
That said, the Democrats could have done this without any Republican votes, and they failed. Many people have already angrily called out current -- and I emphasize the word "current" in the hope that this will change soon -- House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries for failing to get people in the room for the vote. And he certainly deserves every bit of the blame and scorn that is coming his way. But it goes well beyond the infuriatingly hapless Jeffries, because there is no reason why his fumble could not have been picked up by any other Democratic leaders, current or former.
To take but one prominent example, Barack Obama could have looked in on this and said, "Hey, what the heck? You're not pushing this as a top priority?" And even though this was a House vote, surely there were Democrats in the Senate -- including Chuck Schumer -- who should have had an eye on this and who could have taken note that the Jeffries team was blowing it.
Perhaps most angering was that Nancy Pelosi, who goes by the title Speaker emerita, was among the eleven who missed the vote. Why? According to The Hill, Pelosi "said she was in San Francisco for a Veterans Day event." Others blamed traffic as they returned from an event a mile and a half away. Even setting aside that the event in question was deeply problematic, especially in the post-midterms environment, this is insane. If, say, a congresscritter knew that there was an upcoming vote on their pet project, everyone knows that they would be there. Or if it were a Republican-led vote to, for example, repeal the minimum wage, one hopes that everyone on the Democratic side would show up.
And unlike Obama or any current backbenchers, Pelosi knows how to get things done in the House. If she cared, she would have seen that Jeffries was flailing and stepped in to say that this simply has to be done. But she did not, instead saying that she was doing this other important ceremonial thing. She might as well have simply said something like this: "You know, the midterms are over, so we can get back into our comfort zones. And frankly, this Hegseth thing is just not that important to us in the Democratic leadership. Some of us have better things to do. Besides, they can always get back to this when the next Congress is sworn in."
Again, this is a leadership problem. As I wrote here on Dorf on Law last week, "If the new majorities in Congress keep Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries in charge, that will be a bad start." It took less than a week for them to show how true that is. One of the worst things about their actions as titular leaders is that they never seize the moment, causing the people who gave them power to lose the enthusiasm that they deserve to feel after making history last week. Momentum is a wondrous thing, as we can see especially when someone deliberately squanders it.
Above, I invoked the "sad trombone" meme to describe the failure by Jeffries and the others. A better comparison, I think, comes from "Mad Max: Fury Road," which is not only the best "Mad Max" movie by far but among the most fantastic, gonzo action flicks of all time. This one minute clip shows a wild scene in which an eager "war boy" tells his leader (Immortan Joe) that he will perform a heroic act for the cause. In classic slapstick style, the war boy then immediately trips and loses his gun. Joe disgustedly yells, "MEDIOCRE!!"
Which is exactly what I have been yelling all day, not only about the Hegseth fail but more generally about the existing Democratic leadership. Mediocre! Yes, the Hegseth matter can be taken up after the New Year, but one has to wonder whether it will be. There will surely by then be some excuse or other to do nothing, which will amount to saying that there is a larger issue that demands our attention but that we should keep our hopes in check, because the leadership will fail to do anything about that issue, too. Mediocre!
Happily, there was a press conference earlier today in which Senators Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elissa Slotkin of Michigan were calling for a public debate among their Senate colleagues about the Democratic leadership. I have not generally been much impressed with Slotkin, most notably because she followed Schumer and the other power brokers by endorsing Haley Stevens in her state's Senate primary against Abdul El-Sayed. But that is all the more reason to be impressed by what Slotkin said today, including this (starting at the 2:45 mark):
I think it is very clear that on election night the American people voted for change, and they voted for their pocketbooks, and they're exhausted by costs and corruption. And I think we need to hear that. I think whoever wants to run this caucus should come forward with a plan on how they're gonna govern differently, what they're gonna do in the first 100 days to put money in people's pockets, and in particular how they're gonna communicate differently.
I think it's important to demonstrate that we've heard what people want from this last election. ... But at the end of the day, I don't think it's a radical idea to ask whoever wants to lead to come forward with a concrete plan -- not just in words, but in deeds, how they're gonna govern differently.
Schumer and Jeffries bring none of the assets that Slotkin is rightly highlighting. As I also wrote last week, I defy anyone to figure out what either of the current party leaders actually wants to accomplish, other than keeping themselves in power and putting the kibosh on anything that would threaten the party's wealthiest donors. I will leave aside the one issue that genuinely motivates both Schumer and Jeffries, except to say that their stance on that issue is radically at odds with the overwhelming majority of their own voters. But the bottom line is that if Slotkin is right to say that voters want leaders who will "govern differently" (and she is), then these guys are not it. Mediocre!
I suppose that the current Democratic Party leaders could pull an all-nighter and come up with a plan to govern differently, but Schumer has been in political office literally ever since he graduated from law school in 1975, so the chances of a new vision from him are not high. Jeffries is younger. Full stop. They have shown in every way imaginable that they do not want change, because that would ruffle the feathers of the people they truly care about. Worse than mediocre!
We should take special note that Slotkin emphasized the need for leaders who will "communicate differently." Zing! Schumer is infamously dull, rambling, and utterly lacking in charisma. As one writer put it recently, however,
[t]o Schumer’s credit, he has never claimed to be a charismatic face of the party. He said as much on MS NOW, instead referring to himself as the “orchestra leader” who “picks the theme” for the best candidates to riff on. The problem with this analysis is that Zohran Mamdani and Jon Ossoff, with their focuses on affordability and corruption respectively, have done more to influence the Democratic platform than Schumer himself.
And there is that problem again. Vision and communication are intertwined, so lacking vision means that there is nothing to communicate and, therefore, no reason to be a leader. Schumer has never picked themes, and he has tried his best to pick the candidates who are least able to "riff" on the themes that truly motivated voters to vote for Democrats. And it is not only Senator-elect El-Sayed who understandably has no use for Schumer, because the newest Senator-elect, Scott Colom of Mississippi (!!), is also saying that he is angry that his party's leaders all but wrote off the South and that he is "open" to voting for other leadership.
But back to Jeffries. He has more energy than Schumer when giving speeches (a low bar indeed), but the best he can do is to undermine the energy that his party's voters feel. As the most prominent recent example, Jeffries plagiarized paid homage to Obama's career-launching 2004 Democratic Convention speech, in which Obama memorably said this: "[T]here's not a liberal America and a conservative America - there's the United States of America. There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America."
Jeffries went with this: "This is not a partisan moment. This is a patriotic moment. This is not a blue moment or a red moment. It’s a red, white and blue moment because America has won tonight." No one can fault any politician for lacking Obama's speaking talents, but Jeffries managed to invoke Obama's phrasing to make exactly the wrong point. Obama was saying that people should vote for Democrats because Republicans were dividing America and only serving conservatives and White people. Jeffries is saying that Democrats' win is not a Democratic win, even though it was Democrats who did the hard work to convince many non-Democratic voters to come over to their side.
In other words, contra Jeffries, this was entirely a partisan moment. It was nothing but, and he should have been eager to say that his party had been on the right side of history and that the voters rewarded them. If it was not a partisan moment, then why did it even matter whether Democrats recapture the House that Jeffries wants to lead?
I do see that he was most likely trying to sound statesmanlike and unifying, but he was saying -- in his weird and awkward delivery -- that the biggest "blue moment" in at least fifty-two years was somehow not a partisan victory. It would have been possible both to be gracious and to stay on the offense -- to be aggressive, that is, in talking up the party that he wants to lead, for heaven's sake -- but he chose instead to tell a group of Democrats that celebrating their partisan win would not be patriotic. Far, far worse then mediocre!!
When Senator Slotkin said that would-be Democratic leaders need to "govern differently" and "communicate differently," she put her finger on exactly the qualities that the current leadership lacks. Mediocre does not even begin to describe them.
- Neil H. Buchanan