Monday, Jan. 1, 2018 | 2 a.m.
Democrats who think their party can glide through 2018 on a wave of opposition to President Donald Trump didn’t learn anything from 2016.
Sure, the Democrats enter the new year on a bit of a roll, largely due to blowback against Trump. They’ve won key elections over Trump-backed candidates in Alabama and other areas, and fundraising numbers in those races were generally healthy. They have a prime opportunity to benefit from Trump’s historic unpopularity, evidenced by first-year approval ratings that are lower than those of any occupant of the White House since the end of World War II.
But anti-Trump sentiment was high in 2016, too, and he still won the presidency.
Why? Partly because Democrats lacked a cohesive, galvanizing vision to generate jobs, boost wages and help the type of lower- and middle-income workers who wound up turning to Trump.
That’s still the case today. And until Democrats come up with a solid vision, neither they nor the nation will thrive.
Sure, the party offered a jobs strategy last year, but don’t feel bad if you don’t remember it. The Democrats’ “A Better Deal” was a weak-beer package that included more federal funding for apprenticeship programs, new tax incentives for companies to retrain workers, a strategy to lower the cost of prescription drugs and new standards designed to reduce corporate mergers that result in job losses.
Compared with what was being promised by Trump and the GOP — a big cut in the business tax rate, vows to renegotiate trade deals and such — “A Better Deal” was as bland as its name and was several cylinders shy of being the engine to drive an economic turnaround.
Energizing the economy is going to take a lot more than reducing drug prices, retraining workers who lose their jobs and building in some protections against job losses.
So in what could be a pivotal year, the Democrats need to go back to the drawing board and come up with a bolder, more comprehensive blueprint. The new version should include major infrastructure spending, investment in education and training for jobs in new technology, incentives to turbocharge development of renewable energy and programs tailored to help workers and employers in areas that have been hit hardest by loss of jobs in manufacturing, coal, steel production and the like.
To make it a moonshot, Democrats also could include improvements on the Affordable Care Act and sprinkle in elements like the prescription drug strategy to lower health care costs for working Americans.
The bottom line is that Democrats need to offer solutions, not just bash Trump. They need to show voters what they’re for, not just what they’re against. And they need to get people excited about their mission, not just rail against the president.
True, Trump and the GOP are worthy of criticism. They betrayed the blue-collar voters Trump promised to help, via their trickle-down tax overhaul that disproportionately benefits the wealthy and corporations. Although low- and middle-class workers will get some tax relief, it’s not permanent. Therefore, the overhaul will only benefit them to a significant degree over the long term if employers invest their tax savings into growing their workforces and paying higher wages. And as any respectable economist will tell you, history shows that the odds of that happening are slim and none.
That being the case, there’s an opportunity for the Democrat Party to re-establish itself as the champion of the American worker — not an imposter like Trump. With its support of labor unions, immigrant workers and others, the party’s tie to the workforce has always been one of its core strengths.
For too many years, working-class Americans have remained stuck in place economically or have backslid while the economy improved and the 1 percent grabbed an increasingly large share of the nation’s wealth.
For Democrats to make meaningful gains this year, it’s imperative for them to craft a plan that re-establishes upward mobility for those voters.
