Happy now? With an alleged serial sexual abuser in the White House, and an alleged serial pedophile about to take a seat in the Senate from Alabama, the Democratic Party has driven from office a man whose big offense appears to be occasional groping. But worry not, we’re told, by the scolds. Now that the Democrats have the High Ground, they won’t have to worry about “what-aboutism” going into the 2018 elections. Democrats can use the issue of sexual harassment to bludgeon their Republican opponents. The only problem being, as long as I’ve been covering the Democrats — going on 50 years now — they never had a clue what to do with the high ground once they gained it. Not even once. And being able to shame Republicans assumes Republicans are capable of shame, and there is scant evidence of that. Nor is there even a scintilla of evidence that voters would respond to Democratic bleating from the alleged “high ground.” Any doubts? Check the polls in Alabama.
The purists calling for the resignation of Senator Al Franken on Thursday remind me of the purists in the Village Independent Democrats way back in the early 1970s. The V.I.D., as it was known, was the Democratic Party club in Greenwich Village that famously led the charge to beat Carmine DeSapio for District Leader, the perch from which he was the last boss of Tammany Hall, the main dispensary for patronage jobs in New York in the last century. The man who defeated DeSapio twice, in 1963 and 1965, was Ed Koch, who would go on from his leadership of the party in Greenwich Village to congressman and eventually three-term mayor of New York City.
Koch was running for re-election to his congressional seat in 1972, and I was covering his campaign for the Village Voice. I don’t remember who he was running against, but it was a Democratic seat in a Democratic city, and he was a slam dunk to win. One night I accompanied him to a meeting of the V.I.D., where he was seeking their endorsement. This was his home political club. I can’t recall if he was a founder of the organization, but he had to be one of its earliest members. Koch was a Democrat. He was a liberal. He lived in Greenwich Village. Hell, for years he had been the lawyer for the Village Voice. You would have been hard pressed to find a more liberal candidate for congress from Greenwich Village if you had gone out on the streets with a sack of cash looking to buy one.
The V.I.D. had a questionnaire it gave to every candidate for office seeking the club’s endorsement. My recollection is that the questionnaire that year asked the candidates for their position on 100 issues. Koch filled his out and was at the meeting to take questions from the membership. He was quickly informed that he had answered the V.I.D. questionnaire right on 99 of its questions, but he was wrong on one of them, so they were withholding their endorsement. Sound familiar?
Koch took a couple of questions, defending his position — I think it was on whether or not to sell F-16 jets to Israel — and Koch left without the support of the V.I.D. As we walked across 7th Avenue to the Lion’s Head, the local watering hole for writers and politicians, I asked Koch how he felt, having had his own political club refuse to endorse him for such a nit-picky reason. They agreed with him on every single issue but one, but that was enough. He wasn’t 100 percent pure. He chuckled. “I was that sure of myself once. Then I got to congress.”
At the time, Koch was concealing a part of himself that would have ensured his defeat in his election for congress, and probably would have gotten him kicked out of office in an ethics investigation. He was gay. He was never accused of consorting with underage boys, nor was he ever accused of having affairs with staffers either in congress or later when he was mayor of New York. But being gay would have been enough to end his political career at that time. Doesn’t that seem ridiculous, looking back from where we are now, with gay people who were previously banned from service proudly serving in the military, and gay couples who were previously banned from marriage happily marrying every single day, and gay men and women serving openly in political office from the United States Congress all the way down to state legislatures and county commissions?
I’m wondering how things are going to look to us a few years from now after we’ve driven Al Franken and who knows who else from office for offenses that now seem so momentous. I mean, The Atlantic magazine published a story this week by a woman who claimed that at an inaugural party in Washington some years ago, Franken had “put his hand on my waist, grabbing a handful of flesh. I froze. Then he squeezed. At least twice.” How is that going to read 10 years from now, or even one or two years from now? Al Franken “squeezed . . . at least twice”? How are we going to look back on the allegations against Al Franken after Roy Moore has voted some fascist theocratic loon onto the Supreme Court? What are we going to think of Al Franken after the Republican congress has refused to stand up to Donald Trump when he fires Special Counsel Mueller? How is Al Franken going to look when an alleged serial sexual abuser who conspired with a foreign adversary to steal the election of 2016 conspires to steal the election of 2020 from the American people?
Attaining the “high ground” is a good strategy only if you’re willing to rain down a wall of steel on the enemy below, and looking at the 35 senators who lined up against Al Franken this week calling for his resignation, I don’t detect a killer instinct in even one of them. The will to win would be a really nice thing for a political party that’s trying to prevent our country from being driven into the ditch by a bunch of rabid loons who want to take health care away from millions of children (ending the CHIP program), raid the wallets of poor and middle-class people (the welfare for billionaires tax bill), disassemble Obamacare (ending the health insurance mandate in the tax bill), and potentially follow the Lunatic in Chief into a nuclear war (North Korea). On the other hand, purity is a really nice thing if you’re running a dairy and making milk, butter, and yogurt.
HUT two three four, HUT two three four. For 50 years I’ve watched Democrats march into a circular firing squad and shoot each other. When are they going to come to their senses and stop? Will there be anything left of the country to save if they ever do?
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