WHY I KEEP GOING

Be honest, I'm sure you've wondered:)

Photo: Nate Gowdy

Now that the major Party nominees are all but sewn up, you can almost hear the collective “Ugh, not again...” Democratic and media elites who decided it was best to basically skip a primary - promoting the canard that “We don’t do that when there’s an incumbent President (“Did you hear that, Eugene McCarthy?”), muffling the voices and suppressing campaigns of anyone but their anointed candidate - have hardly delivered us to an inspiring moment of political possibility. The most excitement you get from establishment Democrats these days is celebrating the fact that the President finished a State of the Union without losing his train of thought.

And that’s a problem, because Donald Trump has a lot of excitement on his side. So does Robert Kennedy, Jr. for that matter. The idea that a message of “Be afraid, be very afraid,” or “Cheer up, 39% of you are skipping meals to make the rent but the stock market is doing great, so be happy!” is not going to win the election for Democrats in 2024. The blunt truth is that a person has to be somewhat privileged to think that saving democracy is the only thing - or even the most important thing - we have to think about in 2024.

The uncomfortable reality is that to a hungry person, putting food on the table does seem more important than saving democracy. If anything, history shows that desperate people are more, not less attracted to a political strongman. And that’s what makes this moment so dangerous.

Democrats desperately need to awaken from the establishment-concocted trance that led us to this moment. The Party is bleeding voters now – from Black voters, to Asian voters, to young voters, to Latino voters. The idea that raising the money to buy enough TV ads is going to be enough to put the 2020 Biden coalition back together again is a very weak plan for victory in 2024. Reaching out to people, actually speaking to their material needs, would be a far more winning strategy.

I have been on the road for a year. And believe me, what we need to do is offer permanent solutions to the desperate conditions that millions of Americans are living with - from lack of health care, to lack of food, to lack of a well paying job. When establishment politicians or pundits report that “wages are up,” please look at the fine print: you’ll see how often those jobs still pay less than a living wage. We will repeat 2016 if we do not wake up to this.

As someone who tried to get a far more compelling message into the political ethers for the past year – promoting an Economic Bill of Rights, ending America’s War on Drugs, repudiating America’s forever war machine and more-  my choices now are to beat my head against the wall, or to simply keep punching.

With your help I’ve decided to keep punching. In the California Democratic primary alone, we got over 140,000 votes. In Presidential election terms, that’s very low: only 4% of the vote. Still, that’s among the hundreds of thousands of voters who have cast their vote for us in primaries so far, and that number of voters can make a lot of difference in November!

Whenever I’m asked who our supporters are my response is, “The people who hear me.” Our low percentage doesn’t mean I was rejected by voters; it means not enough voters have heard me! If I had gotten a fair shot from the Party, from mainstream media, and from faux progressives who in the final analysis support a candidate promoting the issues they purport to care about only if it doesn’t “threaten their brand,” those numbers would be much, much higher.

I’m not trying at this point to win the nomination; the President has done that. I’m still out there because I’m hoping to get enough delegates to make it to the convention, to have a voice, to represent the interests of those who are basically neglected by the status quo. From corners of the United States to the southern tip of Gaza, we must not remain silent. American domestic and foreign policy is too routinely neglectful of the needs of those who suffer.

And like you, I care.

With your help, we can break through the wall. Or at least go down trying … and that of itself is not nothing.

Photo: Nate Gowdy