Books: "Supermajority" By Adam Jentleson

 

Supermajority: How Democrats Can Build Lasting Power

By Adam Jentleson

W.W. Norton & Co.; hardcover, 288 pages; $31.99

Adam Jentleson is the Founder and President of the Searchlight Institute, who served as the Chief of Staff to Senator John Fetterman and Deputy Chief of Staff to Senator Harry Reid. He is a strategist, author, and commentator with two decades of experience, and he is a frequent guest on television and podcasts. Jentleson is the author of Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Politico, and GQ. 

With the midterm elections approaching, Jentleson offers a way for the Democrats to dominate future elections, and break us of this pattern of nail-biter races, in the engrossing new book Supermajority.

Jentleson is not just looking at this election, but for the Democrats to achieve enduring power over the next decade. In a nod to this idea gaining steam with the election of Barack Obama to the presidency in 2008, he feels they took the wrong lesson from that time. There was a notion that a rising, diverse generation of voters would flock to the Democratic party, while also embracing ideological purity to motivate swing voters.

This was a miscalculation of epic proportions, as Donald Trump succeeded Obama and then, after it appeared he was finished, returned to the White House after Joe Biden's one term, all while the Democrats' tent is shrinking. 

Jentleson sets out to show how Democrats won and wielded power at numerous points in the past century, from Franklin Delano Roosevelt the 1930s, followed by Lyndon B. Johnson in the mid-1960s, right up to Obama's in the late 2000s into the 2010s. 

The thing about those coalitions was they were a bit messy and never pure, requiring the Dems to break away from a binary conception of politics, with a recognition that Americans can have diverse thoughts and values. When Dems were able to compromise on both the campaign trail and in office, it resulted in Social Security under FDR, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 under LBJ, and Obamacare.

In addition to these three achievements, the embodiment of this thinking was Bill Clinton. While he is still around, at this point his presidency was three decades ago, and Jentleson's insights could be new to a lot of younger (under 40) readers.

Jentleson zeroed in on Clinton's success by writing how he "coupled his populist economic pitch with rightward appeals on crime. In January 1992, he left the campaign trail to personally oversee the execution of Rickey Ray Rector, a Black man who shot five people and killed two, including a police officer, before shooting himself in the head; the resulting operation saved his life but lobomotized him. 'I can be nicked a lot,' Clinton said after Rector's execution, 'but no one can say I'm soft on crime.'"

Then, in June '92, after the Rodney King riots, Clinton really staked his claim on that when, at a forum held by the Rev. Jesse Jackson, he condemned an acivist's call to murder white people. This became known as his "Sister Souljah moment," which on a larger point means telling an audience what they don't want to hear.

Clinton built a broad coalition by locking in voters to his right on crime and welfare, while then zeroing in on the economy in the general election. An immediate priority of Clinton's when he took office was a 1993 budget bill, his path to helping poor Americans, which included a doubling of the Earned Income Tax Credit. Then, it was on to welfare reform, which included limits on benefits and eligibility, and after a certain point, work requirements.

While Clinton won handily in 1992 and '96, returning Democrats to power for the first time in two decades. Jentleson says that was an achievement in itself, but Clinton was not able to build the supermajority, as he spent on a lot of his presidency on defense, right up to when he was impeached in 1999.

In one of many unique takes Jentleson creates the sense of a contrast in approaches with how Bill Clinton ran for the presidency in the 90s, with how his wife ran for the office in 2016. While Bill went for broad themes to win over as many voters as possible, Hillary ran on themes that pleased the base, while her campaign also set a tone of just getting her over the 270 electoral votes needed to win. This was after Obama won 365 electoral votes in 2008 and a still strong 332 in '12 when he was re-elected.

This book is worth reading for the simple fact Jentleson delivers one of the most realistic looks at the Democrat party, acknowledging how tough the post-Obama years have been, while also highlighting its strengths in the past century. With that full scope, he does give a path for there to be, to use a well-used word from 2008, hope.

In this excerpt from the Introduction, Jentleson writes of the past decade with Election Night in 2016 as the starting point: I knew that the consequences of that night would be disastrous for the people and causes I cared about. Yet in the moment, when was most bewildering was the possibility that everything I had learned about politics was wrong.

Clinton's primary opponent and antithesis had been Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, who had channeled a torrent of populist energy to rise from backbench senator to a household name. Sanders's performance exposed Clinton's deadening approach of replacing big ideas with appeals to identity. Everything about Clinton's candidacy exuded a lack of ambition. Her aides talked relentlessly of a "path to 270 electoral votes,' a preemptive concession that winning bigger was not possible. She never articulated a vision that all Americans could see themselves in, somehow expecting it to emerge, genie-like, from a pile of white papers. Her loss felt like the exhausted sigh of an entire class, a party out of ideas.

In the weeks, months, and years after the election, these thoughts began to congeal into questions. How had our vision grown so small? Why was the election so close in the first place - and why has every contest since remained so? Is this how things are going to be from now on, with every race for the White House finding Democrats desperately scraping for a narrow majority, but losing as often as we win? As the forces of fascism rise, must we consign the fate of our democracy to a break-even bet against an authoritarian take-over?

The answers I found in the years since revolve around a simple proposition: While some features of our era are truly unique, others represent common threads connecting us to past generations. Mastering our time requires a clear understanding of how we got here, grounded in knowledge about what has worked in the past. What is unique about our era is how narrowly divided we are. In the broad sweep of American history, we have never experienced a run of consecutive elections as close as the last three. What is not unique is that this period of polarization will eventually give way to durable power for one side or the other. This book is about how to make sure Democrats emerge as dominant.

Narrow majorities are too fragile to shift the balance of power. Witness how, even as Democrats have traded elections back and forth with Republicans in recent years, conservatives have consolidated power in the Courts. To win dominance, we must ask what it takes to build an electoral coalition big and broad enough to reign for a generation. Anything less will fail to overcome conservatives' entrenched advantages in antimajoritarian institutions like the Senate and the Supreme Court, and prove inadequate for sustaining Democrats in power long enough not just to enact progressive change, but to maker it stick. A majority will not be enough - we are going to need a supermajority.