After Ten Years, Can We Get Back To Normal?

After Ten Years, Can We Get Back To Normal?

By

Leonard Zwelling

I have been aware of political elections since I was about eight years old and Eisenhower beat Adlai Stevenson in 1956. My parents were staunch liberal Democrats and were very fond of Adlai, but he didn’t have a prayer against the WWII hero general who engineered D-Day, beat the Nazis, and presided over America’s post-war boom economy in the 1950s.

My next vivid election memory is of my mother driving carpool the morning after the presidential election of 1960 and honking the horn in joy as she picked up my best friend and his mother came out of her front door and waved in glee. It was not so much that Kennedy had won. It was that Nixon had lost. Middle class American Jews were petrified of Richard Nixon. History proved that our mothers’ concerns about Tricky Dickie were well-founded.

I celebrated Ronald Reagan’s first victory in 1980 downtown in D.C. at a rally only to vote against him next time horrified by what his policies had done to the less fortunate in America.

In 2008, once again in D.C., I was overjoyed with the election of Barack Obama because that meant lots of turnover on Capitol Hill and I was about to search for a place on the Hill for my year as a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation health policy fellow. There would be lots of choices, right? Wrong.

It turned out to be wrong because the Senate offices of Obama, Hillary Clinton, and a cancer-stricken Teddy Kennedy were off the table and I wound up in a Republican office so that I could serve on the Committee for Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions in anticipation of the fight over health care policy. I was watching from the wrong side for my politics, but I saw all the sausage making anyway. It ain’t pretty!

It was three in the morning in Lisbon, Portugal when I learned of Donald Trump’s victory in 2016 and this black hole of a ten-year period of bad leadership and bad government was launched in the United States. Joe Biden was always the wrong choice in 2020.

Maybe it ended last night. The real message of yesterday’s election is that the Constitution held.

From right here in Texas, where a truly evil trio of Abbott, Patrick, and Paxton were all thrown out of work, to South Carolina, North Carolina, Maine, Ohio, Kansas, and Iowa, the people of the United States sent a message to the man in the White House.

We gave you two chances to make our lives better. You made our lives worse, Mr. Trump. In essence, America gave Donald Trump its collective middle finger.

Normally, I do not post my blogs on the day I write them, but last night was a special night. I wrote this Wednesday morning.

There were many firsts from the first Muslim Senator to the first Black, woman governor. Kansas hadn’t elected a Democrat to the Senate for 94 years and Texas hadn’t for 38 years.

It is now up to all Democrats not to over-interpret their victories, but rather consolidate the party at its center. Advance programs that ease the economic pain for all Americans, not just for your friends in Silicon Valley or those who sit at your Thanksgiving table. Stop the war in the Middle East. Avoid any legislative moves around social issues like abortion, transgenderism, and relitigating the Civil War. Stick to the basics.

If the Dems do that, and avoid any extremist rhetoric, they have a chance to identify a good candidate for President, win in 2028, and try to heal the Trump-induced damage to the world.

Tikkun Olam should be the mission statement of the Democrats going forward. There’s a lot of bad to undo. To quote JFK, “Let us begin.”