Tag: politics

In the run up to the 2008 Presidential election, one thing was clear: people were tired of politicians. After 4 years of Bush, 8 years of Clinton, and 8 years of W., it seemed like America wasn’t going to change (be it for better or worse) by turning to the same people over and over again.

It’s why John McCain ran as a “maverick” who regularly bucked the system. It’s why he chose Sarah Palin as his running mate. She had been governor of Alaska for less than 2 years when she was picked. While she had a habit of saying nonsensical things, she also didn’t talk like the traditional politician.

McCain had to hammer home the idea that wasn’t just business as usual, because even while pushing the “maverick” narrative and choosing a dark horse running mate, there was the simple fact that he’d been in the Senate for 35 years. He was part of the establishment.

On the other side of the aisle was Barack Obama, who easily stepped into the role of the outsider. The fact that Obama was black put him squarely outside the typical presidential race. He was also a single term Senator, and he had been vocal against the war in Iraq, at a time when nearly everyone seemed to be on board with it.

Obama tempered his outsider status by picking Joe Biden as his running mate. Biden was also a long time member of the Senate, but this didn’t dull the shine on the anti-establishment candidate.

It’s oversimplifying, but you could make the case that the 2008 Presidential election was about one issue: Americans wanted someone who would upend politics as usual.

Americans have been trying to find an “outsider” for decades.

Gerald Ford only became president when Richard Nixon resigned. Ford had spent nearly three decades in office, and his role as a dyed in the wool member of the establishment was only solidified when he pardoned Nixon. Then there was also the simple fact that Ford had been named Vice President to Nixon because Spiro Agnew had resigned…and became President when Nixon resigned.

He clearly benefited from being part of the establishment.

Ford was such a company man that even members of his own, incumbent party were looking for an outsider to oppose him. Ronald Reagan was an actor who’d spent 30 years in the entertainment industry, after which he spent 8 as governor of California. He wasn’t just an outsider, he also had the aesthetic appeal that hadn’t been seen since JFK.

But incumbency meant a lot and Ford narrowly won the nomination. But the Democrats had chosen their own outsider in Jimmy Carter.

Not many people outside of Georgia knew who Carter was, which made him the perfect anti-Washington politicians. With the Republicans reeling from scandals, the Democrats could roll the dice.

The problem, four years later, is that the GOP still had that outsider from the primaries, who also happened to seem cooler than Carter.

Since JFK first debated Nixon on television, look mattered. How someone looked, how they carried themselves, became a huge factor is how Americans voted.

Reagan dominated during his eight years, to the point that when his time was up, America decided they wanted to keep going, so they elected his VP, George HW Bush.

The first Bush wasn’t remotely cool and he’d been working in Washington for over two decades. But he rode Reagan’s coattails into office.

He also continued what Reagan had unknowingly started: political dynasties.

What the Republicans hadn’t counted on, though, was a relatively young, saxophone playing Southern Democrat who had no problems going on MTV. Bill Clinton was very much in the mold of Reagan in that he’d never served in Washington and had that “cool” factor.

Presidential elections were no longer (if they’d ever been) about qualifications and experience so much as America wanting the coolest person in charge.

There would finally be a label for this imaginary cool factor when electing Presidents. In 2000, Americans had a choice between continuing the Clinton era with his VP, Al Gore, or sending a legacy, George W. Bush, to office.

The second Bush won and would win again in 2004. It was during his re-election that a new qualification for President emerged: someone I’d like to have a beer with.

This eventually led us to Obama.

Regardless of his actions in office, Obama fell victim to two things: he was a pragmatist and he embraced Hillary Clinton.

The former meant that he was never liberal enough for liberals or conservative enough for conservatives. His pragmatism meant he wasn’t looking to drastically change the system.

His embrace of Clinton only served to connect him to that political dynasty. Obama was not shy towards the end of his administration that he thought (practically knew) that Hillary Clinton would be President after him. In fact, a lot of Democrats acts as if it were a done deal.

There were a lot of reasons why Clinton lost (misogyny being a big one), but the fact that so many acted like her winning was a foregone conclusion, and the fact that she was the continuation of a dynasty, did not help.

And this is, in part, how we got Trump.

He was certainly an outsider and a certain delusional population of America seem to think he’s cool.

Consider that 9% of the people who voted for Obama in 2012 voted for Trump in 2016. They were responsible for getting Trump elected. It would be easy to say that those people voted for Obama because he was an outsider, so they were actually being consistent in how they voted.

Trump’s 1st term was disastrous, and the election of 2020 came so close to the worst of the pandemic that America wanted a reset, which is what they voted for in Joe Biden. They wanted a lifer again, someone who was certainly a part of the establishment, but that was okay, because he needed to fix things. America wanted to return to normal.

Biden did his job, which meant that the old paradigm returned: America wanted anti-establishment again, and Biden’s VP, Kamala Harris, wasn’t going to cut it.

Americans chalked up Trumps’ first term to COVID, which they considered an act of god that had nothing to do with Trump, and suddenly his presidency didn’t seem that bad (it was).

America is desperate for systemic change

The system has been broken for some time, Americans want change, and they don’t particularly care who it is that does it. This is obviously a problem, given how horrible Trump and the MAGA are. Anyone not a straight, white, cis male is a target now. And even those white dudes aren’t entirely safe unless they make a certain amount of money and only have specific political views.

Democrats need to lean into empathy, but they also need to start admitting that the system doesn’t work.