Can the Democrats be saved?

• Author: Garvey, Ed
• Position: Cover Story

For eleven months prior to the November election, I spent lots of time in Vermont working with rail workers to stop the sale of the Central Vermont Railroad to a Texas outfit that specializes in buying railroads and firing employees. Working alongside Congressman Bernie Sanders was one of the great pleasures I have experienced. He never shied from the task, never minced words, knew which side he was on, and told both management and the workers that he had made a choice.

In a word, he would have driven the Democratic Leadership Council completely nuts. No one with his views could win a statewide election in today's conservative climate, the DLC argued. No, the goal is to get away from labor, break from the past, become more like "them," and we "Democrats" will win. Pogo might ask, "Who is we?"

Something strange happened at the polls on November 8. Bernie Sanders won 50 percent to 47 percent with the help of rural voters, suburban voters, and many who voted for moderate Republican Jim Jeffords for the Senate and who gave Republicans big gains in the State Legislature. As Bernie put it, "Workers, family farmers, and the seniors know I'm on their side." They know something else. They know a genuine article when they see it and hear it. Bernie didn't need a poll to decide to get on the side of the rail workers. He didn't call Washington to find out if it was safe to oppose Monsanto's rBGH for cows. He did what his conscience told him to do, and the people responded.

While Sanders was winning his third term with old-fashioned values and progressive positions, how did the DLC do? course, went with the DLC litany of issues: welfare and crime. DLC head Al From and Bill Clinton's pollster, Stanley Greenberg, devised this strategy, and it failed miserably. Representative Jim Cooper and Jim Sasser, pure models of the "new Democrats," lost their races, as did other Southern conservatives, as the Republicans won both Houses of Congress for the first time in forty years.

I suspect the reason many of these Democrats lost was because people could tell they weren't being themselves. They were mimicking someone else's message. Somehow, Democrats responding to the agenda of fear and loathing set by the Republicans sounded tinny. There was something wrong with the Party of the People sounding like the mean-spirited Doles and Newts who want to lock 'em up, throw away the key, take the children from their mothers, and blame the poor for poverty.

It was a stunning...