(Dobbs) Can Democrats Break Out Of The Wilderness?

Their new identity should be scrappy, not submissive.

Gavin Newsom’s fiery retorts to Donald Trump during the riots in Los Angeles made me think about the Democrats. California’s governor might or might not be the guy to lead the charge against whichever Trump wannabe takes control of MAGA in the 2028 election— JD Vance, Marco Rubio, Kristi Noem, Marjorie Taylor Greene, or anyone else— but in my mind, his straight-shooting rhetoric is exactly what the Democrats need. Mealy-mouthed condemnations of everything Trump and his people stand for and everything they do just don’t cut it. When Newsom called Trump “a dictator, not a president,” I almost cheered. Not for the country, but for the candor.

As the former chief Washington correspondent for Politico, Edward-Isaac Dovere, put it this week, “Democratic politicians have spent the last few months talking about standing up to President Donald Trump in his second term. California Gov. Gavin Newsom is among the first faced with figuring out what standing up actually looks like.” I think he faced it and he figured it out. When you’re up against the likes of Donald J. Trump and the clones who have capitulated to his cult, you have to fight fire with fire. Newsom has done just that.

“Authoritarian regimes begin by targeting people,” the governor said in a televised speech Tuesday night, “people who are least able to defend themselves. But they do not stop there. Trump and his loyalists thrive on division because it allows them to take more power and exert even more control.”

He could just be talking to his fellow Californians. But he also could be talking to American universities, American law firms, American medical organizations, American institutions of every kind across the land. He could be talking to every voter. He could be talking to law-abiding citizens of every stripe. It’s true that Trump won the 2024 election on bread-and-butter issues and immigration, but since polls suggest that most people find his performance so far on bread-and-butter to be dismal and his performance on immigration to be horrifying, maybe Newsom’s message about authoritarian regimes will hit pay dirt.

Before you can offer people new solutions, you have to show them how bad the old solutions were. Before you can show them new leaders, you have to show them how hideous the old ones were.

If you’re old enough, you’ll remember the 2004 election where Senator John Kerry went up against the re-election campaign of President George W. Bush. Kerry was a Vietnam veteran who briefly had commanded what was called a Swift Boat, which went on patrols in enemy-controlled territory.

Bush— then the son of a congressman who eventually became President of the United States— got an appointment to the Texas Air National Guard and never left home. And yet during the presidential campaign in ‘04, in a smear campaign that came to be called “swift boating,” it was Kerry, because he came home as an anti-war activist, who was painted as unpatriotic.

It was weeks before the Democrats and Kerry himself fought back. I happened to be setting out to spend a few days with the Kerry campaign, then a few more with the Bush campaign (and then a few with the Dick Cheney and John Edwards vice presidential campaigns) before putting together a sort of “compare-and-contrast” story. I joined Kerry in New York where the first event I covered was a speech at NYU.

He angrily lashed out at Bush and at the “swift boaters” who were dragging him through the mud in Bush’s name. I was sitting there in NYU’s auditorium thinking, “Have I missed something here? Have Kerry and the Democrats been taking on this unconscionable smear campaign and I just haven’t heard about it?” So when it was over, I asked that question to some colleagues I knew who also were covering Kerry. What they said was, “No, we’re just as surprised as you are. He has been all but silent until now. This is the first time we’ve heard him fight back.”

Of course it was too little, too late. However inexplicably, that has been the way of the world with the Democratic Party. I recently heard a commentator on CNN say, Democrats “are afraid to take their own side in a fight.” It’s a clever turn of phrase but all too accurate. It’s not as if Republican DNA welcomes combat while Democratic DNA doesn’t, but when Republicans come out swinging, Democrats generally depend on defense. We can’t make that mistake with Trump.

Gavin Newsom isn’t the only one trying to avoid the mistake. The tag-team of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, aka AOC, drew big crowds in April by hammering on themes that are at the heart of many Americans’ fears because they strike at the heart of many Americans. That same month, exasperated Illinois Governor JB Pritzker told a cheering audience in New Hampshire, “Never before in my life have I called for mass protests, for mobilization, for disruption. But I am now.” And I won’t forget those four divine words thrown in Donald Trump’s face at the White House by Maine’s Governor Janet Mills. When he told her at a meeting of the nation’s governors that her state had to comply with his new rules about transgender athletes, all she told him back was, “See you in court.”

That’s not milquetoast. That’s fighting fire with fire. By contrast, last month I read an interview with Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy. Asked what the Democratic Party should be doing right now to fight back and win the hearts of American voters in 2028, he got into the minutiae of issues like campaign finance reform, restrictions on stock trades while in Congress, and a few other things that would never catch fire. His interviewer, Ross Douthat of The New York Times, tried to bring him back to earth, asking, “Are any of those issues actually Top 1, Top 2 or Top 3 for voters?” The answer is obvious: no. Ideas like those might have merit but they’re not going to even put ripples on the water of a campaign, let alone waves. We need a tsunami. As Maryland Governor Wes Moore told an audience late last month in South Carolina, “Anyone who is talking about 2028 does not understand the urgency of 2025, doesn’t understand the assaults that we are under right now.”

What voters responded to in last year’s campaign was Donald Trump promising that he would make our nation safe, that he would make our nation rich, that he would make us rich. Of course that was a snake oil salesman making the pitch but look at who won the Oval Office and who didn’t.

The prescription of the conservative never-Trumper columnist David Brooks is this: “Democrats have to do what Trump did: create a new party identity, come up with a clear answer to the question: What is the central problem of our time? Come up with a new grand narrative.”

The new party identity should be scrappy, not submissive.

There are Democrats who can do that, who can offer us economic, social, and national security, who can restore the stability that Trump has decimated. But no one will listen to them until they make it clear that despite all the rhetoric, the minions of MAGA aren’t giving us security or stability.

If you need any proof that MAGA is drowning in its own Kool-Aid, go no farther than Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, who said when Trump’s border czar Tom Homan threatened to arrest Governor Newsom, “I’m not going to give you legal analysis on whether Gavin Newsom should be arrested, but he ought to be tarred and feathered.”

So nice to have an adult in the room.

A friend of mine wrote that we should already be thinking about the qualities, the attitudes, the capabilities of who should lead us. “Military experience like Eisenhower? CEO of a stable corporation? A champion of science with political savvy? A brilliant youthful entertainment networker? An experienced governor/politico who has deep and wide administrative skills? Judicial experience with the Constitution in mind? The head of a well-respected non-profit?”

I want all of that, but I’m mindful that if those were the characteristics of the kind of leader all Americans want, we wouldn’t have ended up— twice— with a sometimes failed developer-slash-reality TV star.

But still, who then? I covered the Democratic convention in 2004. John Kerry didn’t win. But four years later, the keynote speaker at his convention, who almost nobody had ever heard of, did. His name was Barack Obama, and he spoke with fire, he spoke with hope, he spoke with conviction.

Donald Trump is a crude man. We’ve already seen proof that potential successors waiting in the wings will stoop just as low.

The Democrats don’t have to be crude, but they do have to be combative. They don’t have to sell lies, but they do have to sell ideas. Ideas that tackle the central problem of our time. And they have to sell them with fire. Otherwise, they will be extinguished.

Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He also co-authored a book about the seminal year for baby boomers, called “1969: Are You Still Listening?” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 39-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.

You can learn more at GregDobbs.net