How a Democrat can win in a red state

By admitting past mistakes, and putting blame where it belongs

Authenticity wins votes

It’s been so long since Democrats frankly admitted the mistakes of their own party, it’s no wonder the public has lost confidence in them. Think of the public and media attention a candidate would get if he actually told the truth about how President Clinton adopted the Republican free-market globalization agenda and got NAFTA passed.

Sure, Clinton is a lovable rogue who did a lot of good things for our country, but making working Americans compete with people making one-tenth as much wasn’t one of them. Keeping wages stagnant by controlling the labor market has been the go-to strategy of investors throughout history, and expanding the labor supply to include the whole world is corporate America’s ultimate cure for rising wages.

His anti-tariff position alienated those who lost their standard of living after NAFTA. The dispossessed also thought, correctly, that U.S., Canadian and Mexican negotiators were biased in favor of corporations and their investors, and a major goal was to lower labor costs.

Trump became president because, in speech after speech, he sold voters on a false narrative of American history. He blamed President Bill Clinton and the Democrats for giving us NAFTA. But it was Republican legislation.

Republicans were, and still are, the party of unregulated and untaxed trade, both national and international. President George H. W. Bush, after all, was the one who signed the NAFTA agreement in 1992 with President Salinas of Mexico and Prime Minister Mulroney of Canada.

Clinton supported its ratification in 1993 because he was persuaded that it would increase corporate profits, and he could reduce the deficit if he raised taxes on the wealthy. He got a small minority of Democrats to vote with the majority of Republicans by promising that NAFTA would have side agreements to protect workers. Agreements were made, but were cosmetic and ineffective. Mexico, especially, had no intention to honor them.

Next, Democrats should point out that President Obama was one of our brightest presidents with immense potential, but he was economically inexperienced and made the same mistakes Clinton made.

After the economic meltdown of 2008, the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression of 1929, Obama relied on the same Wall Street crowd that convinced Clinton to turn the Democrat party into a Republican-lite party: Robert Rubin, ex-CEO of Goldman Sachs and booster of free market globalization; Larry Summers, outspoken proponent of financial deregulation; and Timothy Geithner, Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson, leading advocates for bailing out banks and investment companies after they almost destroyed our economic system.

Whether these economic geniuses were dishonest or simply blinded by their trickle-down biases is irrelevant. What’s important is that their policy recommendations always seem to benefit the rich and powerful first, with only the promise of later benefits cascading down on the common folk.

Problem is, after the rich and powerful deposit their checks, something unforeseen always seems to get into the way of trickle-down, and those lower on the totem pole are left worse off than they were before.

Last, the candidate should take the time to educate the public about how we actually got out of the Great Depression, instead of compromising with the Republican fiction that it was low taxes on the wealthy, and freedom from government regulations. It also wasn’t WWII that got us out of the depression.

Always missing in the conservative revision of history is exactly how producing millions of airplanes, shipping vessels, submarines, jeeps, and tanks — and sending them overseas to blow up, and be blown up by, other nations’ airplanes, submarines, etc. — was good for our economy. That’s not even considering the thousands of Americans who lost their lives in the process.

Conservatives seem especially forgetful about the period’s economic realities. In the first three years of the war, government raised taxes, mostly on the wealthy, and deficit-spent seven times the amount it spent during the entire eight years of the New Deal, which had been ruinously underfunded. Millions of unemployed Americans went into the armed forces, and more millions into the military industry and its support businesses.

Result: Customers in this country had money, investors come out of the woodwork to get it, the economy grew like crazy, and we got out of the Great Depression in a big way.

Of course — given our red states’ cherished devotion to tax breaks for the wealthy and wrong-headed distaste for government programs that benefit mostly middle and low-income Americas — any candidate who would dare to loudly state obvious truths would be viciously attacked from all sides. But only at first.

With increased attention to the issues that really matter, and in an emperor-has-no-clothes moment, even a thoroughly misinformed red state voter may suddenly understand what good government is all about.

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Chuck Kelly is author of “The Destructive Achiever; power and ethics in the American corporation,” “The Great Limbaugh Con, and other right-wing assaults on common sense,” and Why capitalism thrives — and how it self-destructs.”