Democrats are risking a Corbynesque mistake
Tuesday morning’s New York Post headline — “Duh Moines,” after the capital of Iowa, Des Moines — neatly summed up the reaction of most of the watching world to the much-hyped start of the US presidential election.
A new voting app turned the first Democrat primary (where potential presidential candidates are ranked) into an utter farce, with results delayed by almost 24 hours and a host of conspiracy theorists popping up with outlandish theories as to how the debacle occured.
But, tempting as it is to draw parallels between a well-known phrase and the fact that one warm-up event for the botched caucus was actually held in a brewery, the Democrats may have bigger problems in their pursuit of power than a badly-made voting app.
Yesterday Jimmy Carville, the architect of Bill Clinton’s success, offered some home truths to his teammates. He didn’t hold back, but the most salient lesson he offered his party was that it could not — must not — become the UK Labour party.
He called on Democrats to start talking about what matters to people, from healthcare to education, rather than indulging in hard-left socialism and philosophical debates about the crisis of capitalism.
He said there is “some danger” of the party becoming a version of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party; wildly over-estimating how much people want to be an experiment in the great new socialist order and under-estimating how much they just want to be broadly left alone, with a decent set of public services available for the lowest possible cost.
Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren — the Corbyn and Long-Bailey of this race — seem to have missed the memo. The contrast between the Democrats’ muddled messages and Donald Trump’s showmanship could not be clearer.
The President’s facts may be wobbly and his character is abrasive, to say the least, but his message cuts through the noise like a knife through butter. He shouts about great employment numbers while his opponents try to outflank each other on fringe left-wing issues.
If the Democrats want to win, they need to find an equally compelling narrative. Carville may be interested to know that the frontrunners to replace Corbyn are currently arguing about the future makeup of the party’s Executive Committee. It seems lessons should be learned on both sides of the Atlantic.