How to Win an Election

Not by mean-spirited attacks on candidates or denying the progress we have made.

It seems to me that the path to victory for the Democrats is an honest, even humble, understanding that progress toward a set of goals, in politics as in life, doesn’t justify a victory celebration.  I hope this will be the theme of the nominating convention.  I wish it were the path taken by both political parties. Celebration is a form of posturizing. Posturing is wasted energy, and worse, a failure to keep going.

For those of us that believe that life is always an unfinished project, you convince us only when you show that you are continuing to move in the right direction.  This has always been the meaning of the “American Dream.”   It was inspired by ideals.  Thus, it is never finished.  In each generation we take up the challenge and the hard work of change. 

So how does a political campaign make sense to a people who feel their country has fallen short?  Simply by saying we have not “fallen.”  That we are still standing, still climbing.  That the future will be better than the past, as long as we do not defeat ourselves.  The Democratic Party tries to offer the voter proof that we have been on the right path.  They should not claim Social Security, Medicare, racial and gender justice, workplace safety and so much more, small steps and large, are forever-reasons to support their party.  They should only offer them as evidence that again and again they have made this a better society, while admitting mistakes and recognizing the deep and tragic flaws in our national life and history that make progress difficult and uncertain.

If you improve access to health care, you do not make it available to everyone. Even when you raise the standard of living for many, you leave many still living pay-check to pay-check. You can strengthen the “safety-net” and still find it weak in places.  Not everyone benefits from “positive” change. But a clear eye uses just such facts to plot the direction forward. We are not finished. We will never be “finished.”

You can get poetic and rhetorical about this during a campaign.  Politics at its best is an opportunity for mutual encouragement.  It is a journey from campfire to campfire to inspire for the battle, for the next day. 

I am tempted to say that if you don’t believe it, then get off the road.  Let others through. 

Moreover, I admit that this is just one way to read American history.  I can listen with understanding and great sympathy to those who tell me we have lost our way or come to the journey’s end.  I claim, however, that mine is the American Way to read history.  And it reflects careful and honest scholarship.

But, yes, it is finally a matter of faith.  That is why it needs to be felt deeply and why many of us find the metaphor of reaching beyond the horizon a lode-star of that faith. 

As Tennyson said in his poem “Ulysses:” 

…Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades
For ever and forever when I move.

We pick up the torch, we pass on the torch.  And we never say, “mission accomplished.”