Rumbling And A-Tumbling On Campaign Trail 2020-The Mysteries Of Presidential Politics Unfurled

By Allan Jackson

Anybody serious about politics, meaning me in the first instance, will if they play the game long enough find that they have twisted and turned in the winds more than once. Take this 2020 Presidential election cycle. Normally I would, along with many friends, cover the race without getting our hands dirty. From the sidelines. This age of Trump though has most of us worried that the Republic cannot stand another four years of this madness. If Trump wins reelection, meaning that he will be totally untethered from anything not having to run again then people like me, left-wing people will be facing the bastinado come Inauguration Day 2012, or find ourselves running up in the hills somewhere.

To forestall that possibility, either possibility actually,  a number of us in January met to decide not whether we would cover the campaign but how deeply we would invest in some candidate whom we thought could beat Trump and save us from that bastinado/head for the hills scenario. On its face that idea might not seem surprising since millions of citizens take a crack at politics every four by participating in the presidential sweepstakes. But not us. We, the group that formed the committee in Boston to work some campaign have all been involved in more left-wing political causes that you could shake a stick at, all the time for most of the past fifty years or so (or in the case of Frank Jackman now sixty years). We are the remnant of the Generation of ’68 who abhorred the idea of getting bogged down in elections for individual candidates with blah-blah programs soon forgotten when the power boys roll their dice. We would particularly scoff at somebody like Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders for, as socialist in good-standing, even thinking about running for elective office. Be as we said and still say more often than not part of the problem not the solution.    

            

But we live in troubled times, a time when we feel the Republic, that beautiful old ragged institution that we would all prefer to work under is in danger from forces well beyond whatever one Donald J. Trump can unleash. And hence that early January 2019 meeting to decide who to support with cash, time and energy in 2020. The meeting itself was made up of veterans, including veterans now peace workers, old-time civil rights advocates, a sprinkle of students, mostly bogged down with college debt, community organizers and activists and the like. The key was that each invitee had been, was, is an organizer who would go out and organize others to swell our ranks (something that has actually happened although as any political organizer knows you can never have enough of them).  

That first meeting, that contentious first meeting centered on two points-who to support and where to expend our energies since we were close to New Hampshire the first primary state in the nomination process come February 11, 2020. That latter point was fairly easily settled although a couple of people balked at focusing on New Hampshire when there was plenty of work to be done at home. They left but the rest of us agreed that Iowa and New Hampshire were important historical grounding boards for most successful campaigns.

That brought us to which of the then myriad (and still plentiful) candidates ready to take on Trump, some serious, others who knows what they were about. This is where some of us got a little shamefaced (actually Frank Jackman brought up the old refrain about electoral candidates being part of the problem not the solution although he was among the strongest partisans that we set up a committee early and grab a candidate as well. The “contest” if you will had been centered on one Bernard Sanders, U.S. Senator from Vermont who had run hard but unsuccessfully against Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Massachusetts U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren. Others were vetted, including the perennial Joe Biden, former Vice President under Barack Obama and the darling of the Democratic Party establishment (maybe less so now in the winter of 2019) but came up with too much negative baggage, or were too light-weight to take the heavy mud fight that will be the 2020 General Election.       

I found it hard to believe that after a million years of scoffing one Senator Sanders that I would be his biggest partisan come selection time. But such are the times. The kicker for many of us was that despite being out in the wilderness from many years with his entirely supportable programs like Medicare for All, his version of the Green New Deal and college debt forgiveness he stood fast all these years and you could trust him to work like seven dervishes to enact the programs after 2020. Trust a characteristic in very short supply these days. Courage too now that I think about it. In the end that would be the main draw from selecting Senator Sanders as our candidate. Senator Warren has adopted many of Senator Sander’s ideas along the way and for a while was dishing out a new program a week but we felt she was a weak reed against a guy like Trump. Somebody mentioned that there were only so many wonks who would appreciate her papers (including us who wound up having to read them all). Not enough to    

beat Trump in a mud fight. I will leave it at that.