#democrats

First things first: that went better than I could have imagined. Really. Congratulations to all the people who put enormous effort into making an improbable election outcome a reality. I mean, even if he ultimately loses—with 95% of votes counted, the NYT has Colom leading by <0.01, and margins don't get much more razor-thin than that—the idea that a black man was ever leading the race to be a Senator in Mississippi by any margin isn't something I would have expected to see in my lifetime.

Yet, that was the easy part.

Now the Democrats have to make a disciplined push to make a wide swath of people's lives better…and that's a hard problem, and they have a track-record that is kind of spotty.

Take, for instance, the ACA. I am glad the ACA exists. It has made healthcare available to people who otherwise wouldn't have had it, which has absolutely saved lives—some of them have been my friends. It has had knock-on effects like helping to sustain healthcare in rural areas that otherwise wouldn't have it.

But as a retiree who doesn't yet qualify for Medicare, I'm also glad that by happenstance I don't have to make use it. The bureaucracy is confusing, the options are often unattractive, the cost to customers is enormous (though subsidized for many), and somehow it has all lead to enormous profits for health insurance companies. Those are some big caveats that no one outside of the very-lefty "Medicare for All" crowd talks much about but actually touch the everyday lives of working people.

With the exception of the Biden Administration—or at least Lina Khan—Democrats have generally been happy to oversee enormous consolidation of business interests, even as the experience of the last 50+ years tells us that this is going to result in cuts in jobs, and less competition, leaving people out of work and at the mercy of ever-larger corporations.

I could go on, but it would just make me depressed. My point is: Democrats stand up to power occasionally, but not nearly as much as they should if they want to truly improve the lives of most people in their states and districts—or even if they just want to give people hope! You don't have to always win to be respected and appreciated for your efforts—but you have to fucking try.

And this is a particularly tough time to shoulder that burden: the havoc the Trump administration has wreaked across the government, climate change, the national debt, humanitarian crises across the globe, a fucking war with Iran, there's a lot to deal with.

What I hope they don't do is spend all their time going after Trump. Mind you, I do want to see Rule of Law restored as a bedrock principle in this country, and I'm happy to see laws passed to rein in the worst excesses of what Trump has been doing to enrich himself, but I don't want to see the Democrats make going after Trump the core of their mission. There will be time for that later; right now you need to shore up your position by serving the needs of the people who elected you—and going after Trump doesn't achieve that.